AI for Real Estate Investors: Adapt or Get Left Behind | Charles Blair

Charles Blair (00:00)
You can be resistant to that change all you want. You’re gonna either adapt it or you’re gonna get ran over by it. And that’s a natural fact. That’s a fact that you will not be able to walk away. Can you control the amount of that you bring in your business? Absolutely. Does it have to touch every aspect of your business? No, it does not. So the key thing that I tell people, if you’re going to bring it in your business, what you have to bring it in.

Is the part that allows you to generate more revenue. Think in terms of that. Get away from that, this shiny new toy.

Meghan Escobar (02:07)
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Real Estate Pros Podcast hosted by Investor Fuel. I am your host, Meghan Escobar, and today I have the pleasure of sitting down with an OG in the game by the name of Charles Blair. He is the CEO and founder of Chucky Buys Lucky Houses, and he’s also pivoted into the marketing space and has a marketing company called Mad Marketing. Of course, I’m gonna let him tell his story, but

That is who is on the show with us today. I wanna take a second to thank you for taking your time, Charles, to be here and providing some value for our audience.

Charles Blair (02:41)
Thank you Meghan, I appreciate you giving me the opportunity.

Meghan Escobar (02:43)
Yeah, absolutely. I’m pretty positive with the stuff that we talked about prior to hopping on here. It’s gonna be some pretty valuable information. Our audience will be able to walk away with some great insights. So take your pens out, take your phones out, take notes, cause we’re gonna dive in here. And for those who might not be familiar with Charles Blair or Chucky Buys Lucky Houses or the Mad Marketing, talk to us a little bit about what your main focus is these days

What where you’re where you’re operating.

Charles Blair (03:12)
Sure. We’re in the Maryland, DC, Virginia market. Our home base is Baltimore, Maryland, to be exact. We also are doing opportunities in Houston, Dallas, and Jacksonville, Florida. So one of the main things that we are interested in as a business is to continually grow.

And with the advent of AI, it has allowed us to really stabilize the leakage of deals and really create systems and automations to really keep us on top of the market mind.

Meghan Escobar (03:40)
Love that. You know, one thing that really caught my attention when we were talking was where it all started. this is this is quite the story and this is something that I think is very important to bring onto the show because people need to know how success is created. I think that is a very important aspect. And Charles, ninth grade, did you say you quit?

Charles Blair (04:03)
Well, actually I didn’t quit. They kicked me out. Okay.

Meghan Escobar (04:06)
Let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about it.

Charles Blair (04:08)
Yeah. born in the projects of East Baltimore, I was one of those guys that thought he knew it all. And when I got into school, the school couldn’t teach me anything. So I got as far as the ninth grade, then I got kicked out of ninth grade and my mom said you have to find a job and the only job I could find was a security guard. And that job

It didn’t lead anywhere until one night I was able to go into the newspaper and actually was actually on television to see a Carleton Sheets commercial. And Carleton Sheets said you could do real estate with no money, no credit, and no experience. And I checked every box. So I purchased the Carleton Sheets course and that’s how I got started in the business. And

That’s my story. The only thing after that was the point where I got a mentor after going through the Carleton Sheets course ’cause it gave you a lot of general information. I worked with a mentor and I didn’t have any money at the time. So I’d offered my actual working in his business as a substitute for paying for it. And he charged me actually he gave me fifty dollars a week as salary and I worked five days a week in his pro in his actual business. And I call that the

highest paying job I ever had because after eight months of being in his business, I became a full-time investor and been one ever since for over thirty-five years.

Meghan Escobar (05:21)
Yeah, thirty-five years. So I’m sure you probably have some stories that you could tell. And I another thing that I like to bring up is you mentioned there were quite a few failures that you have gone through along the way. Absolutely. And first somebody who’s been in the game for 35 years and you’re still in it, still growing, still scaling, still adding on new ventures and journeys, talk to us about.

One moment that kind of sticks with you that you go back to any time you’re facing a hard yeah next step or l stepping into another unknown territory.

Charles Blair (06:42)
Yeah, this moment has a failure attached to it, but it winds up having a success at the end. one of the things I tell people when we talk about deals and what can go right and what can go wrong is that sometimes a great deal can wind up being a deal that causes you to go in the hospital. And that’s what happened with me. I had a great deal, me and my partner, and we got the deal in the contract. It was thirty-five apartment buildings, purchase price was about

$3.7 million. And the owner of the property who was selling it to us did not like the wholesaler that was associated in the deal. So he refused to go through with the contract. So we had to do an actual lawsuit to force the seller to sell to us. And the actual lawyer fees in that process was well over six figures. So

That was the downside of it. The good side of it was that we won and the judge forced that seller to go through with the contract. And it was one of my most profitable deals because we purchased the deal or should I say those apartment buildings at three point seven million and when I sold my interest in them the value was around eight million. So and each of the units was rehabbed and each of the units was

Going through the whole process. We had to evict all the tenants and all that good stuff. The part that really cost me, or should I say, the hospital part of it, the stress that I was under during that whole process caused me to have a heart attack at twenty-nine. Wow. At twenty-nine. So at that point, I said, nah, I can’t go on like this. And so I took a year off, I sold my interest in those properties, Mount Vernon properties.

Mm-hmm. And that’s pretty much that good, the bad and the ugly side of that one deal. Yeah.

Meghan Escobar (08:33)
You kind of faced all aspects during that deal. Exact

Charles Blair (08:37)
Exactly.

Meghan Escobar (08:37)
And it sounds like it opened your eyes to how important w work-life balance is, right? And

Charles Blair (08:44)
you hit it right on the nail, Meghan. You can’t just put everything into one basket. And that’s a recipe for failure.

Meghan Escobar (08:50)
Yeah, absolutely. And so since that episode has happened, have you, found yourself in any of those upside-down deals again that you walked away from because you knew where it was gonna lead or yeah.

Charles Blair (09:03)
I’ve had a couple of issues when it comes to deals that fell through. If anybody come to you and say, Yeah, I did a hundred deals and every last one of them was profitable, the first thing I’m gonna tell you is to hold your wallet. Because something is coming up where that person’s gonna try to reach into your pocket. So to answer that question, I haven’t had anything to the point of putting me in the hospital, but I’ve had some deals where we had to walk through dealing with contractors.

The whole nine yards because we call our business a business of transaction engineering. So any deal that comes across that table will come up with four or five different exit strategies. And sometimes you have to fall back from a deal that you was going to do this way and move it to that actual placet in the business because the exit didn’t work. So yes, absolutely sometimes you have to change with the deal flow.

Meghan Escobar (09:52)
Gotcha. And what do you focus on to f like I guess I’m curious what your process is to figure out what’s a good deal, what’s a bad deal, when are you ready to move forward? When are you ready to walk away?

Charles Blair (10:04)
Yeah, first of all, in regards to what’s a good deal, what’s a bad deal, I love the process of the maximum allowable offer formula. We use that on wholesale deals. We have s depending on the jurisdiction that we’re working in, it could be anywhere from sixty percent as high as seventy percent. If we’re talking about a BRRRR approach, we’re at eighty percent. We also do subject to deals. We also do deals where we’re doing what’s called master leasing.

Those deals are deals that is a deal by deal basis based on the cash flow, based on the actual in dollar amount that we’re putting into the deal. So that is pretty much where we’re at right now. We look at a deal with a lens as to saying, Okay, if this is one app avenue of opportunity, what’s the second? What’s the third? So every deal we try to find at least two to three exit strategies for that one deal.

Meghan Escobar (10:56)
that

Okay so you you’re making sure that there is a good way out of every single deal that you’re entering.

Charles Blair (11:03)
You have to. The formula that we live by in our company is action plus offers equal profit. And that formula states this if what you’re doing each and every day is an action that will allow you to do offers, then that’s an actual action that you should be repeated day after day after day. The end results is going to be profit. So that’s the formula for your success. Action plus offers equal profit.

Meghan Escobar (11:29)
Sounds like a good formula. And we talked a little bit about, how important marketing is when it comes to being an entrepreneur, being in business. It doesn’t matter if it’s real estate, service, like whatever it is, right? Marketing is pretty important. And 35 years you’ve been in the investment world. And about eight years ago, you added on to that Mad Marketing. Talk to us a little bit about where that came about, why it’s important, and you know, all those things.

Charles Blair (12:35)
One of the persons that I have a lot of respect for is a job is a gentleman by the name of Chris Krimitsos. And he owns a nation nationwide podcasting company where he has something called Podfest. I was invited when he started out to come to Tampa and talk about the way that we find deals. And by doing that, and I’m talking about on the real estate niche, I got the name The Mad Scientist.

Because of the creativity. Hence you see the name The Mad Scientist in the background. That place gave me that nickname because of the way that we look at opportunities and the way in which we take marketing to that next level. And that’s where we’re at right now. Almost seventy five percent of what we’re doing in our business revolves around AI and the way AI can

Allow you to have more time, generate more revenue, and automate your business. Remember going back to the having that heart attack at twenty-nine, when I realized the way I was working, that had to change. And being able to bring in artificial intelligence, being able to bring in marketing strategy, automations and systemization, that has allowed me to take last to take all that stress off of

A business that’s already stressful and kind of make it a little bit more easier to consume by allowing you to not work in your business as hard as you need to be.

Meghan Escobar (14:04)
Yeah. And you know, what’s that one piece of advice that you would give to people because AI’s been around for a while, but it’s big out right now, right? We’re hearing it. AI w has been out before it was labeled AI. Google is a form of AI. The internet is a form of AI, right? Like,

What is a piece of advice that you might want to give somebody who’s super resistant to incorporating AI because they’re thinking it’s going to create disconnect, human disconnection and all that?

Charles Blair (14:33)
You can be resistant to that change all you want. You’re gonna either adapt it or you’re gonna get ran over by it. And that’s a natural fact. That’s a fact that you will not be able to walk away. Can you control the amount of that you bring in your business? Absolutely. Does it have to touch every aspect of your business? No, it does not. So the key thing that I tell people, if you’re going to bring it in your business, what you have to bring it in.

Is the part that allows you to generate more revenue. Think in terms of that. Get away from that, this shiny new toy. It can do this, it can do that, it can create a actual opportunity where you can have a man riding a pig down the street. That’s not gonna make you money. You need to find the actual systems, the actual tools, the actual artificial intelligence that you can use to actually generate profit.

And if it doesn’t do that, move on and find another direction.

Meghan Escobar (15:30)
Love that. And you talked a little bit about you educating individuals now in the real estate world on how to incorporate AI into their business. You have a school community. You wanna talk a little bit about that?

Charles Blair (15:42)
Well, the main thing I want everybody to understand that if you’re not doing it yourself, then you’re not doing it at all. And what I mean by that is everything we do in our business, about seventy-five percent of it, revolves or is being touched by AI. We create custom apps for our workflows. We create custom apps for lead generation. We create custom apps for customer outreach, all built around AI.

And one of the things I’ve learned that other businesses should and want to have these types of systems. And that was the reason behind the REI AI school community, where we show other business owners that’s in the real estate niche how to implement it in a profitable way in their business without the hype, without the you gotta do this, you gotta do that, and nobody and the person who’s telling you that haven’t done it at all.

So everything we do in that community is based off what we’re doing in our current real estate business.

Meghan Escobar (16:42)
Hmm. I’m glad you brought that up. w when it comes to mentoring and finding someone who’s done the things that you’re trying to do. Yes. How has that made a difference for you in your journey as an entrepreneur?

Charles Blair (16:55)
You just think about what you just said. You guys have the program where you help investors, you have the mastermind and so on. Through that actual process, you’re able to cut down your mistakes by actually being able to bounce off this idea, this idea, and so on. That’s one of the key factors of having a mentor or someone to talk to. The fact that it can keep you out of trouble. And in this environment

It could keep you out of jail if you’re not doing your business correctly.

Meghan Escobar (17:26)
Mm. Yeah, that’s a whole fact. What’s the next big goal for Charles Blair in the Chucky Buys Lucky Houses in the marketing, in the school? What what’s coming up next for you?

Charles Blair (17:35)
That’s good question, Meghan. I think the next thing is my wife is ready to leave her full-time job that she’s working. She works in an emergency room at a hospital here in Maryland. We’re in the process of building a house in Barbados. That’s the next thing. Six months there and six months in the United States. So for us, it’s scaling down a little bit on the resident on the market, on a real estate investing, Chucky Buys Lucky Houses side.

I love the teaching. I’m a education junkie. I gotta hear, I gotta learn. And to me, that’s what keeps me young. I’m sixty-three years old now. So I’m at the point right now where I’ve done this, done that, and it’s time to ride off into the sunset into Barbados and have some oxtail. Amen.

Meghan Escobar (18:20)
I love to hear that. Good for you. Good for you. have a solid plan in place. And I guess that’s another important thing, right? It’s like having a plan. Yeah. Well I hear well we hear different versions of it, but like a dream without an action plan is or a goal without an action plan is just a dream, right? would you like to kind of expand on that?

Charles Blair (18:41)
Yeah, absolutely. Because I would call the intro level things that you can do in your business is to treat it like a business. One of the reasons why so many new investors fail is they treat their business like a hobby. If you’re going to do real estate, if that’s what you really want to do, then break down your

Daily tasks, break down your weekly tasks, break down your monthly task, perform those tasks at a high level and stick to them during the times in which you’re supposed to do them. I’m a firm believer that success have leaves footprints. If you look at any successful business that’s out there, I guarantee you that successful business is a master of their systems, a master of their tools, and a master of their process.

So that’s what I would tell you. Whatever you’re using in your business, be the best at using that thing. And that’s going to get you in the right direction to success.

Meghan Escobar (19:39)
Told you we was gonna bring gems, guys. So go ahead and jot that down. Awesome. Charles, thank you so much. And before we do wrap up, if somebody wanted to reach out to you and learn more about, what you’re doing in the school community, what just really pick your brain on things here. Maybe collab. What would be the best way for them to reach you?

Charles Blair (20:00)
You can reach me at I have a school, I have a YouTube channel at Charles Blair. I have over eight hundred videos where I talk about using AI and talk about real estate investing on that channel. You can reach out to my email, [email protected]. [email protected]. Or you can go to my website, Chucky Buys Lucky Houses, and reach out to me through there.

Meghan Escobar (20:22)
Perfect. And we’ll drop those links below to make sure you folks have a way to just directly connect with Charles here. So thank you so much again for sharing your story, your time, and more importantly, your perspective and the way that you operate in your business. And I believe we need more people in the space who are doing things the right way. So thank you again so much for your time and being here.

Charles Blair (20:44)
Well, Meghan, thank you and Investor Fuel for giving me this opportunity. I really enjoyed it.

Meghan Escobar (20:48)
Absolutely. And for those that are listening in and found value from this, be sure to hit like and subscribe. We’ve got more conversations coming in with operators just like Charles Blair here, who are building real businesses with real people and AI in real time. All right. We’ll see you on the next episode.