How John Medina Rebuilt His Real Estate Business

Mike Hambright (00:00.814)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today I’m here with my buddy, John Medina.

I would say I would call you a good friend, we haven’t talked in years, so it’s great to see you and and catch up a little bit. And the last few years has been an interesting ride for a lot of folks either even if they’re doing well. I would say most people have been working harder than they have in a long time. And if some struggled, then they’ve if they stayed in the game, they found a way to kind of write the ship one way or another. And so we’re going to be talking today kind of about back to basics like I think it’s easy to get attracted to lightning a lot of shiny objects. It’s going after new acquisition strategies, new experts,

exit strategies and sometimes the best thing to do is just to reset and kind of get back to the basics and get refocused and that’s what we’re talk about today. So John, how are you my friend?

John Medina (00:43.289)
I’m doing good, Mike. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah, I consider you an old friend, too. I’ve known you for years. You guys, you’re a great guy. You bring a lot of value to people, and I really appreciate you having me on here. Thank you.

Mike Hambright (00:53.25)
Yeah, great to see you. before we jump in, why don’t you tell us your backstory? You’ve been a real estate investor for a long time. And we talked a little bit about the past couple of years. think without stealing the thunder for the whole show, we’re going to be talking about some of your lessons learned from advertising to ramping up your team, to getting attracted to shiny objects in the business and stuff like that over the past couple of years and kind of where you’ve evolved. So don’t steal your thunder for the show. Otherwise, it’ll be a five minute show. But tell us a little bit about your backstory.

John Medina (01:20.825)
Yeah, so thanks Mike. Yeah, so I live here in Los Angeles, San Pedro, California, down here in the port. I lived here my whole life, 58 years, born and raised here. So it’s my family pretty much, so pretty interesting. Yeah, I was a plumbing contractor for years. So I started, I got into plumbing when I was 19, and I worked about four years for some companies around here, and I just decided, hey, I’m gonna go on my own.

I wasn’t meant to work for anybody. So I kind of just took a chance and started picking up jobs around here. What’s interesting is for living in the same community for years, I had grandparents and friends and family that lived here. And so I was able to kind of get some business with people that just knew me. They knew I was a plumber. But it’s interesting, I was doing plumbing on houses and that’s all I can get at the time. And I never really wanted to be, I did industrial commercial plumbing. I was a new construction guy, just to get to the chase.

And all of sudden, man, I was miserable. I was fixing toilets, crawling around houses. That’s how to make a living. And I wasn’t really a toilet fixing guy, right? I used to take offense to that. I was like, I don’t fix a toilet, but hey, you kind of had to to make a living, so to speak. So I kind of just squeaked by there for a while and didn’t have to work for anybody. And it was tough. You make some money, spend it, make some money again. It always showed up. So yeah, and then I got a license. And then once I got a license, I kind of just started growing the business and started doing construction again. And yeah, I got into what I really liked, industrial commercial.

And I did pretty good. had a good run. about 2012, I was like, man, I’m getting kind of tired of doing this plumbing thing and wanted to buy some rentals. So I took some classes from a guy named Bruce Norris that was a local here at a Riverside, but a California guy, great guy. I still see him. And decided, okay, I had some money in the bank. How many rentals could I buy with this amount of money I have? So I started kind of buying rentals. And short sales were big back then. So was pretty easy.

You don’t really have to do much for a short sale. You just got lucky hooked up with a local realtor in the area that I wanted to buy in. And next thing know, I just started buying houses. It was simple. mean, was like, know, houses were cheap back then too, especially around here. You know, so I started picking them up and buying them. And I was like, man, this is so easy. I should probably quit plumbing and start doing this full time. So in 2014, I kind of just jumped into it and just, you know, kind of put my plumbing business to the side and just started using my construction skills.

John Medina (03:46.563)
start flipping houses. So yeah, that was it.

Mike Hambright (03:50.306)
and then yada yada yada the rest is history because that’s been eleven twelve years now right?

John Medina (03:56.105)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was a lot easier at the beginning because it was interesting that at the beginning, you know, no one wanted these houses. It was still coming out for the you know, the debacle there and nobody wanted these houses. I’d send postcards out. I’d be the only guy getting like these people were begging me to take their houses the first year. It was like so simple. But it was interesting in 15 and up forward, everybody got back in the game. And that’s when that’s when you needed. That’s when you really needed like to build a business after that.

Mike Hambright (03:59.948)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (04:21.836)
Yeah, and I think we’ll talk about this. Obviously, I want to hear your story. One of the things that I think, John, and I know that you’ve, you know.

I don’t know this about you. Like you, if you considered over the past couple of years, like doing something else, but there’s a lot of people that left the industry because things got hard. Right. And I think, you know, you owned another business before. I think you would probably agree. It’s back to that, that, you know, some of the, some of the kind of memes or things we’ve seen around, like choose your hard, like everything that’s worthwhile is hard. Like you could go do something else, but that too will get hard unless you settle for probably a life that you’re

John Medina (04:50.679)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (05:02.402)
that you would have regrets from, Like anything that kind of the driven entrepreneur wants to do is going to get hard because we’re constantly trying to push the boundaries of what that business can do for us or how much we can accomplish inside of that box, right?

John Medina (05:18.465)
Yeah, and you know that’s a great point because I, yeah, you know I…

It got yeah, the last three years has been kind of tough. We’ve had like I can tell you some stories, right? It’s like there’s some there’s some there’s I got my ass kicked and but I’m still here to talk about it. And you know, at one point, yeah, I didn’t want to quit, you know, for a split second. You know, I’m not a quitter, but you know, I did think about it. And it was, you know, last year, my mom passed away. I had some really, really things happen to me. But then again, as far as like like like as far as the business not really doing good last year, you know, I had some really good wins on the other end, too. So I mean,

Mike Hambright (05:29.282)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (05:33.506)
Yeah.

Yeah.

John Medina (05:53.613)
As you know, it’s not always going to be easy, right? And I think when you go through these challenges and you really start like question yourself and digging deep and figuring out who you really are and setting goals and just getting back to the basics, there’s a lot of peace in that. Now, you know, there was a lot of settlement in that period too. And I’m very spiritual.

Mike Hambright (05:58.744)
Yeah.

John Medina (06:21.995)
I’m Catholic, I tell people I’m Catholic, I sign up for these prayer exercises, and every morning, my morning routine is I go back and they give me an exercise and I have to go back and I have to really dig into my past and ask a lot of questions and it’s tough, but you know what, I got the answers. What’s good about those answers is that it’s helping me move forward into this year and I’m stoked right now.

Mike Hambright (06:42.382)
That’s great. Yeah.

John Medina (06:43.001)
you know, and telling everybody this is it’s actually liberating for me because, you know, I was, yeah, it was dark, man. It was it was you. You question it. You know, I question myself, is this what I really want to be doing? You know, and I said, what I really want to be doing. I love Hawaii. That’s like my my my that’s my my spot. You know, I was like, well, I can just I just want to go to Hawaii and sit under a palm tree. But then I know that coconut’s going to hit me on the head after about two weeks. don’t know what the hell did I do? And now I’m out of the game. And, you know, I mean, I got a lot of equity in my house and stuff. I can make it some time without working, but.

Mike Hambright (06:53.091)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (07:04.95)
All right.

Yeah.

John Medina (07:12.863)
No, that’s not what I’m here for.

Mike Hambright (07:14.434)
Yeah, there’s a couple of, you know, there’s a Jim Rohn quote that I’ve mentioned many times lately, which is,

the one that says, don’t wish it was easier wish you were better. And I think, you know, when you go through a tough time, it just makes you a stronger entrepreneur, a better person, maybe a better spouse, maybe a better parent, maybe not. mean, not everybody always gets better in every area. But I’m not talking about you specifically. But I just think having gone through challenging times is what allows you to stand the test of time. Like if everything was easy forever, like it’s not that’s not possible. Right. Like, and so you have to go through challenging times.

John Medina (07:25.335)
Yeah.

John Medina (07:35.502)
Yeah.

John Medina (07:49.624)
No, it’s not.

Mike Hambright (07:51.761)
to get stronger.

John Medina (07:53.241)
Yeah, and you know what? It’s interesting that you’re 100 % right. And I found, and I knew that, but I didn’t like it. I’ll be the first to tell you, I didn’t like it. I had a lot of advisors that I talked to, you know? No, no, I got a lot of people I talked to and I’m like, this sucks. And they were like, well, know, and believe it or not, yeah, I’m pretty big on digging deep and trying to get to it, know, figure things out. And yeah, it wasn’t fun, but you know what? It’s necessary. I think it’s totally necessary because if you don’t go through that, you think it’s going to be good all the time.

Mike Hambright (07:59.756)
Right. You didn’t choose it, but yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Medina (08:21.945)
And that’s what happened when things were really good and things got really good in in 2022 before the market kind of adjusted with the rates and everything. You couldn’t do no wrong around here. I you were getting an extra 50, 60, 70 grand on a house because of, I wouldn’t say dumb luck. wasn’t, was people were pushing that stuff up. And it’s like, know, I never thought I was the greatest guy. I would acknowledge, I used to tell my partner, I have a partner, Ricky, you know, Ricky, was like, we’re just getting lucky right now, but this isn’t going to last forever, you know?

Mike Hambright (08:49.774)
right?

John Medina (08:51.255)
Yeah, so you, know, in those times you have to really dig deep and you have to really remember, you know, who you are. And that’s one thing that with my mom passing away is being there for her, being with her there for the last couple of months. It’s like I was able to really look at her and go, man, she was she was an entrepreneur. She worked hard. She taught me a lot of great things that really that really helped me be at peace with her, but also to know who I am because I know who I am. Right. So that’s a really, really powerful thing. So I’m glad that you brought that up, because if anybody’s struggling.

Mike Hambright (09:18.243)
Yeah.

Well, let’s share a couple of things around lessons learned. Like let’s focus on maybe like from an advertising perspective. I know you’ve had some challenges. Everybody’s had challenges. ask, I run an agency. We’ve had some challenges and we’ve seen a lot of people that have challenges, but I think, you know, in the spirit of growth, and I’m not saying that anybody here shouldn’t be focused on growth. Like sometimes we, we kind of, you know, as they say, got to get out over our skis a little bit and start making decisions. And we assume that people that we hire.

John Medina (09:28.075)
Yeah. Sure.

John Medina (09:45.794)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (09:49.29)
going to do what they say they’re going to do and they don’t always do that as we know. Whether it’s an agency or even a contractor we hire, right? But let’s maybe let’s start with kind of advertising, just some of the lessons learned over the past few years.

John Medina (10:01.857)
Yeah, think, know, well, first of all, people make big promises that they can’t keep, right? And especially like some of the bigger agencies, like for instance, SEO agencies, they’re gonna promise they’re gonna do, they’re promising that they’re gonna check all these boxes for you. And, you know, what you find out is they only give you so many hours to do certain things. So they’re just really focused on that meeting with you to show you the charts and the graphs from the Google console.

how this is going up and this is going on. at the end of the day, things are going up. But at end of the day, it’s like, there’s stuff broken on the back end or there’s things that are going on that are not working. And at end of the day, it’s like, my biggest concern is ROI. We need deals to survive. you’re showing me all this traffic and all this kind of great stuff that’s going on, but we don’t have any deals, we don’t have any deals. That’s the scoreboard, right? For me, it’s gonna be like, what’s the ROI on that?

So what we found out is that we started doing SEO on our own. We brought it in-house. We started studying it. I guess the thing that’s easy now, easier is AI. You could ask AI a lot of questions. They’ll go on your website. They’ll scrape it. You get a lot of stuff out of AI. then Ricky had a background in SEO.

from college, which was some time ago. we kind of just got, Ricky got started doing some really deep dives into stuff. And we came up with a process and the system and we figured out what needed to be done. Now we’re just chipping away. So we, you know, the EOS system, it’s a rock. We’re just going through that. And we have, you know, we have like 50 pages that need to be revamped. So we’re just trying to tackle, you know, by the end of the quarter here, try to get some fresh content on there and make it more local and add more pictures. And it’s working already because our traffic is 10, it’s

Since we took it over in September, we’ve already 10x the traffic that we had from before. We don’t have a lot of traffic, let’s see if we’re getting deals. So think we got like three or four deals recently from SEO. there’s a scorecard, right? So you can see it’s moving. So yeah, that’s my biggest takeaway.

Mike Hambright (11:54.669)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (12:01.262)
That’s great. I think, you know…

over the past three to five years for sure. mean, there was so much focus. If you go back like three to five years ago, so much focus on there were so many people that were doing SMS marketing, cold calling, all those things that that provide cheaper leads, but they’re generally lower quality leads, right? They just if they contact you like an inbound lead that contacts you is just a better lead because they raise their hand and they want to talk to you. But if you interrupt somebody at dinner like and they’re like,

John Medina (12:30.327)
Yes.

Mike Hambright (12:34.152)
I don’t know, make me an offer. Maybe I’ll sell it. Like that’s not a that’s not a great offer. There’s no distress there probably. Right. And so I think, you know, back to even hiring agencies, you have to be careful when they start to say things like, well, we generated the leads. If you can’t convert them, that’s not our problem or whatever. Right. They’re sending traffic to you. But it’s like, at the end of the day, all you care about is I say ROAS, the return on ad spend, just that return on your investment. That’s all that matters. Like, so that’s why you can get way cheaper leads through

John Medina (12:49.229)
Right. Right.

Mike Hambright (13:03.952)
let’s just say texting, has been largely destroyed at this point. mean, there’s still some people doing it, but not nearly as many. But the lead quality was so poor, and a lot of people don’t really measure that return on ad spend, because they get addicted to the cheap leads, but they’re crappy leads, you know?

John Medina (13:20.697)
100 you know it’s so interesting that you said that because you know these paper lead for writers right You know so I’m not gonna mention your names We use them all so they’re all in the same bucket as far as I’m sure but you know They’re charging for three four hundred bucks in the bidding system to get these leads And it’s like you know they don’t convert so we track everything I mean we’re tracking things like there’s no tomorrow so you know it’s and then you’re you’re you’re you get a credit Which is good if it doesn’t work, but you’re you know you’re got like maybe let’s say out of you know a hundred leads

you know, only about maybe 30 of those are actually leads. 70 of them are like, who knows what’s going on? And you get credits on those too, right? So you’re spending all this time and energy on a hundred. You have to call those people. And they’re in the system that, you know, we have a pretty good follow-up system that we’re beating the hell out of this thing. We have a follow-up special, Sasha, she’s going through those things. So you’re your CRM is full of a bunch of leads that basically you can’t even get a hold of. And you’re, these people, your people are working so hard to chase people that.

They’re probably ghosts at this point. And you put on this energy and then you call them and they don’t even know who you are. Like you’re saying. And then it’s like, wow, all of a sudden you get one SEO lead, they know who you are. And you talk to them because they’ve gone to your website, they’ve done the research, they know who you are. You close those people like 50 percent. It’s amazing how much better those leads are. So what we come to the conclusion is, you know what, let’s just shut those things off.

Mike Hambright (14:38.423)
anything.

John Medina (14:46.243)
Let’s quit wasting our time on chasing people that aren’t even there and putting all this energy out. Let’s just, you know, now you don’t want to, you don’t want to just sit there on your, on your hands and think that just magically things are going to show up. No, we’re doing the work behind the scenes to get more leads, but also to the people that are coming to us, they, they’re, they’re ready to do business or at least, at least talk to you and give you the, the least run the sales process with you, you know, and that’s what we found out. So we’re now are just like, it’s funny. We just, we should.

Somehow that, you the bidding system with one of them got kind of bit up a little bit. Shut that thing off as fast as we can because we didn’t pay attention to it. We spent a little bit more than we wanted. So it’s just off now. Now we’re working off credits and a couple of leads came in right now. But I could probably open the door and say what happened with that lead? you know, they don’t have a house for sale or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, yeah, we’re kind of at this point where it’s like, you know, less is more. And it’s a hard, that’s a really.

Mike Hambright (15:31.563)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (15:35.02)
Yeah, well quality is better than quality. Quality is more important than quantity in most instances.

John Medina (15:40.1)
Yeah, and that’s a lesson there too, Mike, is in this business, know, everybody’s saying do more, do more, do more, do more, right? But what are you doing more of? You’re just doing more of, you’re just doing more busy work to get you net zero, know, to net you zero. And then you’re exhausted at the end of the day. So it’s almost like, yeah, yeah.

Mike Hambright (15:58.328)
Yeah, that’s clearly not the goal, but that happens a lot, right?

John Medina (16:02.519)
And I had a coach, Dr. Jeff Spencer, that’s awesome. And he trained Olympic athletes and he was Olympic himself. And he had, have his chart on the wall right here. It’s just like, his whole thing is like, you know, want to zone pace. don’t want to, don’t want to zone pacing is like, not, you’re not like.

you’re not at a speed where you’re walking and you’re definitely not at a place where you’re sprinting, but you’re in the middle and then you can see opportunities coming to you, right? So that’s very important because we always want to like, don’t want to outrun your, you don’t want to outrun, like you said, before you get over your skis, so to speak, and you know, get going too fast. So there’s a lot of stuff that we’re doing now. It’s just like, there’s a lot of, a lot of patience built in the business and a lot of restraint too, by saying no to people that are about fit. So that’s a big takeaway too.

Mike Hambright (16:32.664)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (16:44.664)
Yep. Yep.

One other curse for entrepreneurs. think you probably dealt with some of this is like taking on more, but not having the right team in place or having, you know, and you may be in your mind, you made an investment in the team, but they’re not the right people or whatever, right? Like we just assume that as entrepreneurs, we tend to be able to wear a lot of hats because it’s our business and we’re efficient and we’ll work harder to kind of get there. But sometimes we, we, we build out the team or we’re focused on that, that growth. Like I want to scale up, right. And we start to hire people, but they’re not necessarily the right people or.

or we don’t have the right training in place for them, or we are not paying enough to retain really good people or attract really good people, or we kind of end up hiring B players instead of A players. There’s all sorts of lessons learned there. Any lessons learned from a team perspective that you can share? We haven’t talked about this yet. I know they’re there. I can see it on your face.

John Medina (17:32.275)
100%. I mean, if that’s, yeah, you’re, you’re, man.

Yeah, it’s interesting because you know, it’s wow, wow, that’s that’s a really good one. Because, know, 2022, I’ve already said this, we had our best year ever. Six months, we were crushing it. Right. And all of a sudden, it’s like, man, we’re to do more. I was like, we got to do more. Let’s do more and more and more. And then we went and I hired a CEO. Oh, I just kind of started backing off. You know, I was I was I went to Croatia and I was on a cruise in the Mediterranean over there thinking like, wow, this is the life. I never thought this is like what I want to do my whole life. But it was like I was burned out, Mike. I was like I was like

stressed. was good I was on vacation but when I came back, you know, I was recommended by another coach of mine, hey get a COO. Well I hired a COO and then once you bring on like an A player type of guy that you’re paying pretty good money because this is Los Angeles, no one’s going to work here for a

$50,000, know, a, it’s a, you know, it costs a lot of money to live around here. All of a sudden you try to scale and go bigger. Probably the worst thing we ever did at this point, you know, we burned through a lot of cash. We, it was almost like all the money I made, I had to give it back. And a lot of entrepreneurs have that story. There’s always this, this moment where you, you, you, you make it and then you get away from how you made it. And then you kind of have to give it back and you have to start over again. And that’s kind of where we’re at right now.

Mike Hambright (18:23.181)
Right.

John Medina (18:48.473)
I don’t want to say we’re starting over. We’re not starting over because we have a brand that’s recognizable and that carries a lot of power. And we get a lot of referrals. And that’s where the gold is for the referrals, right? But yeah, that’s where we’re at right now. We’re just kind of back to the basics. It’s almost like when Ricky and I started in 2017. It’s just like we were just.

Mike Hambright (18:48.675)
Hmm.

Mike Hambright (18:53.518)
Sure, yeah.

Mike Hambright (19:06.158)
So what are some of the lessons can you share from the CEO? Not specific to that person, just was it you couldn’t, was it an affordability issue that they didn’t really take as much off your plate as you thought they might? they, they not have the right training? Like sometimes we hire people, but we don’t like I’m, I’m guilty of that. have a bigger team than ever by far now, but I have a problem of saying like, ah, I’ll just do it or I’ll let you know when I’m ready. And I just like, I have a hard time giving it up, you know? And so sometimes I give it all up and sometimes I won’t let go.

John Medina (19:09.944)
Yeah.

John Medina (19:33.079)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike Hambright (19:36.122)
So it’s like, it’s not even consistent, but like maybe you can share some of your lessons there.

John Medina (19:41.111)
Yeah, you’re reading my mind again. It’s like, yeah, that’s exactly what happened. would, you I was kind of just, you know, we had it like, it’s funny. I moved like just across the street. I had a small office and everybody worked at home. Now everybody’s in the office. I got a bigger office and you know, just, was just, you know, he’s asked me what to do. I’m like, just go figure it out. But then again, want, but then again, and then I, figures it out and I didn’t like it I want to change it. And it was just, I don’t know if I’m that guy. I’m not, I don’t really know if I’m able to like just let go completely. I’m going to try to learn maybe in my sixties. I’m a couple of years away from that.

You know, because every decade of your life, you’re you kind of I think your your your your vision changes a lot, you know, but there’ll be some lessons that I learned there. But yeah, it was just the market was changing. You know, it’s this this California market is extremely tough, L.A. especially. So we started doing stuff kind of nationwide and doing innovations and just trying to get things under contract. And then it just got to the problem where you’re, you know, a whole new sales system. So we joined another group and.

And they had a different way of selling. The girl that worked for us forever was really good at working at home and having her own style. Well, they didn’t like her style. And they says, well, this doesn’t work. You need to do this. So slowly but surely, kind of transitioned the people out of here that were really good for what we were doing. And then all of sudden, by trying to go nationwide or certain states, maybe California, Florida, we just, and the market changed too. The market got really tough, like in 23. And we just didn’t.

I don’t think we adapted well to the situation.

And then we started just like cold calling and all that kind of stuff where I don’t like cold calling me personally. It’s just not something I want to do. And we started doing a bunch of stuff that kind of got us away from what made us successful the year before. And then we bought some properties too. Like I bought some properties out of state, which isn’t a good fit for me. And even like, you know, down in the desert here, like Palm Springs is probably two hours away. There’s a place called Landers. We bought a house down there and we’re going to Airbnb it because that was big at the time. And then we went ahead and bought one in Yucca Valley, which is

John Medina (21:41.611)
close to Joshua Tree. They’re real close to each other. And we actually got that thing is Airbnb. Well, you know what the market changed. So that thing never rented. So now we got a house full of furniture. That’s two hours away, two and a half hours away. So what do we do? We brought it back here to our town here. We sold it all, you know, you know, that. Yeah, that was a huge lesson right there. I had no business being in there. I was like, I’m a hotel. I’m a hotel owner or whatever.

Mike Hambright (21:51.278)
Yeah.

John Medina (22:04.377)
I hate this business, right? So it sounded good at the time. That was a huge one. And then the one at Landers, which is in the middle of a five acre property that we bought, the market was booming out there because everybody wanted to be away from everybody from COVID. Well, we bought it from an ex-con. You know, I that’s who we deal with, right? And the guy buried, he had 10,000 tires, 12,000 tires around a five acre property. You know, this is a really big lesson. Well, you know, we trusted him to haul them away. He didn’t haul them away. He buried them in the ground.

Mike Hambright (22:04.512)
All right. Yeah.

John Medina (22:31.501)
He buried 12,000 tires in the ground on a property. Now we’re getting ready to put this on the market. The neighbor shows up and says, hey, you know the guy buried the tires? Well, no, we didn’t know that. Well, guess what? Now I got to dig them up. I literally, with my plumbing experience, I got a tractor. I dug up 12,000 tires. I shit you not. I’m lucky I had that kind of experience. would probably cost me like 80 grand. Because now you got to haul them away. They’re not recyclable. They’re dirty. I mean, you talk about like, there’s a whole show on that.

It was this crazy what happened. But see, I have integrity. In my integrity, I could not sell that property to somebody else knowing that those tires were in the ground. I don’t want to get sued. And to sue the ex-con would have been like a nightmare, right? So I literally went out there and I stayed out there and I dug up those tires. It took me probably 10 days and I got rid of them all. But guess what? I could be on your show today and say I got rid of them all.

Mike Hambright (23:14.766)
All right.

Mike Hambright (23:27.33)
Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Medina (23:29.177)
And sometimes too, when you go through these rough periods, you have to question yourself, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna do the right thing? you gonna like, because I could have not said anything. And I think most people wouldn’t have said anything, but I knew they were there. with the core values I have and the way I want to run my life, I could not live with myself if I did it that way. So it is what it is. So yeah, that’s a big lesson. And maybe, so I’m not buying stuff that I,

don’t sight unseen anymore. I’ve kind of put a lot of my old checks and balances, processes back in place and they weren’t hard to find. They’re in the Google drive. You just had to drag them over and start doing them again. So that was the lesson.

Mike Hambright (24:07.854)
Right.

Yeah, you know, one thing, John, is the past couple of years, the people that are doing the wrong thing aren’t here anymore. And I’m not saying that there aren’t some people that always did the right thing that just decided to leave the industry or left or whatever. like if you do the wrong thing, it shows up in everything. Like there’s this there’s this quote about, you know, what you do, anything is how you do everything. You know, like do you if you do if you kind of like make bad decisions in one area, you probably make bad decisions in other areas of your life. And the people that are doing stuff like that have so many.

John Medina (24:29.39)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (24:39.44)
in so many areas of the life that they can’t weather the test of time in anything they do. first off, kudos to you for always doing the right thing. But I can tell you, like, there’s not very many people around in our industry right now that are still operating that went through the last few years and were willing to make that struggle that consistently do the right thing. Like, the people that do the wrong thing are gone, because they made so many other decisions that just knocked them out of the game one way or

John Medina (25:06.423)
Yeah, 100%. And it’s funny story, but probably the guy about that problem from that was in jail, he’s probably back in jail for doing stuff like this.

Mike Hambright (25:11.916)
Right. You should look them up. You should look them up. There’s got to be public record. There’s got to be public record. Not that you want know necessarily. What you should do is send them a tire in prison, you know? Like a big gift box with a ribbon on top, but it’s just an old tire.

John Medina (25:22.475)
I know what that is.

I can laugh about it. That’s, you know, cause you know, I would have cried before, but you know, I, you know, I never gave up. It’s just like, you just, like you nailed it. It’s like, I’m into this for the long haul. You know, I’m not into this for the short haul. I’m into the long haul, you know, and, and, you know, there’s lessons learned and you just know, it’s like, you know, someone calls from Landers, we hang up the phone, you know, you’re so, you’re not buying anything.

Mike Hambright (25:48.428)
Yeah.

So let’s talk about this idea of kind of getting hyper local, which is how you used to do it. And then you said you went national at some point, right? And so you kind of back to just that local model. And I know we talked a little bit upfront about, you know, some of the competition and you’re just south of LA. So some of the competition in LA and some of the other markets and there’s some players that play over a huge swat like whole state even, or certainly the LA metro area. People don’t know like LA County alone, I think is like 10 and a half million people or something. It’s a massive. Yeah, it’s massive.

John Medina (25:56.685)
Yeah.

John Medina (26:11.949)
Yeah.

John Medina (26:17.561)
Well, it’s the size of Rhode Island. It’s the size of the state. Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (26:20.784)
It’s massive. but deciding to go local and you know, you have connections and you have relationships and you can build a brand in a local market, maybe a little more to your taste maybe, but just talk about that decision of going big and then reeling it back in.

John Medina (26:40.569)
Yeah, I think, you we came up with this is like, you know, we’re back to the time and energy, you know, it’s like we’re spending all this time and energy like, like, you know, driving two hours for me to go look at a property. And that was a problem with when we got those problems, those those properties in the desert, we kind of were transitioning. So I kind of have two companies, I kind of like like, you know, we have the the the Jamedina buys houses, which is like, you know, the sales and marketing company that we bring in really kind of as a wholesale deal. And then then I have my construction company.

My plumbing company is still kind set up as a construction company. I’m going to get a California, I need a general contractor’s license. I’m getting that here probably next month. I’m going to pass the test. you know, we have things kind of split up. So what we’re doing is, is the, you know, running this construction company, which is the rehab stuff, because see, I do everything in house. I’m, I have guys that work for me, W2 guys, and I hire all the subs. And so I’m kind of running that as a construction company. They’re too hard to manage when they’re two hours away. Then you get hit.

people rip you off, they’re not in great areas. We had someone come in and seal all the wiring not that long ago. So that’s just part of rehabbing, right? So if we keep everything local, it’s just really easy to get to. Plus we know the area. We know the area really well. I know this area really well. The million dollar houses here, they sell pretty quickly. We have a good industry here. We have the port. The port has good jobs. So by being local, you know the neighborhoods, right? And that’s gonna give you the advantage over other people.

Mike Hambright (27:48.771)
Yeah.

John Medina (28:05.209)
And then plus two, know, our town is, now our town’s, you know, maybe four square miles, so you gotta kinda go a little bit further out. But people know me, they know Ricky, we’re local here in this community. So we could just, you by us being here, having an office and stuff like that, we can basically, you know, provide value to people. And we’re just like you, you wanna provide value to people. So.

We’re here to provide value to people. Plus, they’re easier to manage if they’re going to be rehabbed too, right? Or Ricky’s an agent too, so he could list those properties. still pretty good. Get a decent spread out of just listing a house around here. So that’s the advantage that we have. That’s what we’re building towards. It takes time, right? It’s taking time right now, but we’re doing some emails with you guys on the Investor Machine. And it’s very niched. It’s not all of LA. It’s just in this area that we’ve identified we want to be in.

We’re building our SEO muscle in that area. We’re running some ads in the local newspaper, maybe the church bulletin and some social media to people. So getting out there to local agents again. So we’re just kind of just getting back to where we started. When I started, my mail area was about what I’m mailing right now. I didn’t really mail to all of LA County.

because it’s just too big. It take you two hours to drive right now from one end of it. Where I’m at, I’m like in the south end to the north end or the, I may say I’m in the whatever, the other end of the county, Lancaster. It take me two hours to get out there right now. No traffic. Yeah, there’s my whole day. Yeah, and if you don’t manage these rehabs, they go to shit. People just do whatever they want. Even these guys work for me every day. You gotta manage them.

Mike Hambright (29:28.054)
Yeah, Yeah, two hours with no traffic. Yeah, that’s crazy.

Mike Hambright (29:35.95)
for sure.

Yeah.

John Medina (29:39.715)
you not every day, but you have to be there at least once a week and set the tone. So yeah, then you start losing money if you’re not tight on that.

Mike Hambright (29:43.65)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (29:47.862)
Yeah, you got to get it tight. You got to get those timelines tight. awesome. Well, John, it’s great to see you, my friend. If folks want to connect with you and learn more about what you’re doing, maybe you can share a little bit more about just exactly where you’re at in your market and if folks want to connect with you in any way.

John Medina (29:53.527)
Yeah, great thing.

John Medina (30:02.841)
Yeah, I’d say we’re in the LA Orange County market, it’s the best way to say it. So we kind of do stuff everywhere. People have a deal they want to bring to us, we’ll look at it anywhere. We’ll JV with people. We know a lot of people. So yeah, I would say just go to my website, JohnMedinaBuyhouses.com. And that’s probably the best way to get ahold of us. You can fill out a form or just call the office for that number. And then Ricky, my partner, answers the phone a lot. So yeah, we’re open to…

to do a business with people, especially if people want a JV or they have something that they just want, you know, we’re all about helping people and giving back. So someone just wants to call and have some information, we’re good with that. But yeah, we’re here. We love to connect with people. And I have Instagram and Facebook, JohnMadeanAdviceHouses.com. So yeah, we’re on there and that’s probably the best way to get ahold of us.

Mike Hambright (30:50.316)
We’ll some links down below, so good to see you, Yeah, yeah.

John Medina (30:53.025)
Yeah, thanks Mike. I really appreciate you. It’s good to see you too.

Mike Hambright (30:56.558)
everybody. Thanks for joining us today. At end of the day, you get to find you have to run a business that kind of fits your life, right. And so it’s going to ebb and flow, there’s going to be some ups and downs, there’s going to be some challenges. But if you stick with the business, this is a great business to be in. I know it’s been a challenging couple years. But there’s ebbs and flows, and there’s market cycles. And I have a feeling that 2026 is going to be an amazing year for real estate investor, we’re start to see some stuff break loose here. So appreciate you guys so much for joining us on the show today. We’ll see you next time.