Subscribe via:
Show Summary
In this episode of the Real Estate Pros Podcast, Jaben Makings, founder of Onnix Investments, shares his journey from aspiring pool company owner to successful real estate wholesaler. He discusses the challenges he faced in the early stages of his business, the importance of building a strong team, and the strategies he employs for agent outreach. Jaben also provides insights into the current real estate market and emphasizes the need for focus and mastery in business.
Resources and Links from this show:
-
Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode
Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Jaben Makings (00:00)
a few months ago, we had sellers thinking that it’s 2021 where the market’s crazy and, you know, people are getting multiple offers. So the sellers want those prices and then the buyers think it’s 2008. So we had this this weird gap for a little bit where the buyers are really deep and the sellers aren’t wanting to come down. We’re kind of seeing the sellers finally come down a little bit and it kind of balance out. But if you will.or thinking about getting into the market right now and starting your own company or getting into wholesaling or getting into investing, I don’t think there’s a better time to do it because there’s so many decent deals to be had. There’s a lot of people struggling right now. So there’s a lot of money to be made.
Kristen Knapp (00:37)
Yeah.Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m Kristen and I’m here with Jaben Makings, who is the founder of Onnix Investments. So thank you for being here.
Jaben Makings (02:22)
I appreciate you having us on.Kristen Knapp (02:24)
Yeah, so your business has been able to scale very quickly in just a short couple years. So let’s go back to the beginning. How did you get into the real estate game? ⁓Jaben Makings (02:33)
So I originally moved down to Arizona right out of high school at 18 years old. I eventually wanted to start a pool company, which is why I moved down to Arizona. moved down, started working for a pool company to try and learn the ropes. And a few months into that, was like, I don’t want to be doing this for the rest of my life. Like the owner was having to jump in when people were calling out, he was an older guy. And I’m like, don’t want that to be me when I’m 65. And knowing what I know now,you can build a company where the owner doesn’t have to be in there on the day to day. But I had no clue that you could do that at the time. I thought you’d have to be working until you retire. And so I remember reading a book back in high school about real estate investing, about rental properties. And so I’m like, hmm, what better way to get super rich, make a ton of cash, and start buying a bunch of houses than by becoming a real estate agent?
And so I got my license and that couldn’t have been further from the truth, the quick cash, whatever. But I ended up enjoying it somewhat and became a realtor for probably two to three years. I still, it still wasn’t necessarily getting me closer to my investment goals. So I was kind of keeping an eye out for different opportunities and Holstein had caught my eye a couple of times. And what I really liked about this was the fact that you get access to
all of the best deals because you’re selling all these fixed and flipped properties to investors and then can just cherry pick the best ones. And so I finally decided to make the jump all in about two years ago. So I put everything I had built, you know, the prior two to three years aside and dove all into wholesaling.
Kristen Knapp (04:21)
That’s amazing. So at what point did you really make the switch of like, can do wholesaling as a full-time career?Jaben Makings (04:29)
I think I just, I took the risk right away and just went all in. So I was kinda over the, yeah, I was over the agent stuff and I just said screw it, we’re going all in on this. I knew some successful people in it and I’m like, I’m gonna make this work.Kristen Knapp (04:44)
And this was fairly recently, Wow. Wow, so what did that look like in the first year of business, kind of figuring it all out? How did you, how were you able to get the mechanics going?Jaben Makings (04:47)
Yeah, two years ago, two years and a month.It was super tough getting going, Lots of ups and downs, ups and downs. I got to have a month where I make a little bit of money and then two months of no money. And then a month of money and then a couple months of no money. it was, it took a little while to really get rolling. It took about a year, year and a half. And then once I kind of had the hang of things, then I started hiring for it. And that’s where I’ve seen the biggest success because you can’t scale a business as a one man show. Like there’s a certain,
Kristen Knapp (05:55)
Yeah.Jaben Makings (06:15)
level that you’re gonna hit. And so once I started hiring, that really changed things. And there’s been a ton of struggles trying to get that figured out. And we’re still figuring it out as we go. But it’s been able to scale the company tremendously where I’m not having to be as much in the day-to-day sales. And that’s delegated to other salespeople.Kristen Knapp (06:33)
Right, and I feel like hiring is often the hardest part of the job, getting good people around you. So what are some tricks you’ve learned to hire the right people?Jaben Makings (06:43)
to hire the right people. I think it’s interviewing them and making sure that you get along with them and they’re a good culture fit. So the way we do it is obviously we bring people in from typically Instagram or Indeed and then we will set up a quick phone interview first so that way we’re not wasting time just bringing in random people ⁓ for an interview in person. And once we, on that phone interview we’ll.we’ll typically pry quite a bit. And one of the biggest things that we ask that I’ve seen stomp like a ton of people and weed out a ton of people is we’ll ask them about their prior jobs. And we ask them what their bosses are gonna say and how their bosses are gonna rate them when we talk to their bosses and get a reference check. We’re not saying if we call your bosses or anything like that, we say, when we actually call your boss, how will they rate you on a scale of one through 10? And a lot of them get jumbled up and and.
Kristen Knapp (07:40)
Yeah.Jaben Makings (07:40)
So thatthat usually works very good.
Kristen Knapp (07:44)
Yeah, that’s good trick for sure. And how many people have you been able to hire to fill out your team?Jaben Makings (07:51)
Right now we have four sales guys, a transaction coordinator, a virtual assistant, and I’ve probably hired and fired between around 15 people, but right now I feel like we have a solid group of guys that are consistently producing.Kristen Knapp (08:02)
Yeah.Yeah, talk about kind of realizing when somebody isn’t a good fit and how you move forward with that and how you, you know, maintain the integrity of the business as you’re trying to move forward.
Jaben Makings (08:20)
I think our biggest thing is keeping the culture intact is making sure that people are hitting their numbers every single day. Like, of course there’s gonna be one-offs, but it’s not letting them continue on if they’re not hitting their numbers. You need to nip it in the butt right away and sit down with them and figure out why. And if that continues to happen, then they can’t be on the team because that’s such a bad standard for everybody else. Everybody else thinks they can get away with this.You kind of have to make an example of them in a sense. Like if you’re not going to hate your numbers, then you’re not going to be here in this place that other people want to work.
Kristen Knapp (08:59)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And you’ve been able through filling out your team, you’ve been able to almost double your monthly revenue, correct?Jaben Makings (09:08)
Exactly, yes. We just had our first six figure month last month and that was, as I was saying before, all because of my team. Like I definitely could never have done that alone.Kristen Knapp (09:21)
Yeah, that’s amazing. so tell us more about Onnix, kind of what makes it special.Jaben Makings (09:27)
So we do strictly agent outreach. So what do like 90 % of homeowners do when they decide that they wanna sell their house? They’re gonna go online and look for a realtor or they’re gonna call up a friend and see if they have a realtor that they’ve talked to before. And when these realtors get these properties, our goal is to be in contact with them and have a decent relationship built with them so that way they think of us. They need to know, like, and trust us.So that way they send us these properties and we can offer on them before they actually hit the market.
Kristen Knapp (10:35)
Amazing, so it’s all about relationship building. And how you kind of, how have you been able to expand your network and really get deep relationships with these people? Because I’m sure there’s a lot of people trying to do the same thing you’re doing. How do you stand out?Jaben Makings (10:37)
Exactly. Yes.Mm-hmm. I think we were talking about it before the interview, but our biggest strength is speed. So most investors, it’s crazy. They don’t respond to these agents. They kind of leave them hanging for several hours or several days before they get back to them. Our goal is if we have a property sent to us, we need to respond within five minutes, and five minutes is on the high end. And then once we get that property in, we can kind of stop them from sending it to…
other people and then we’ll start working on our numbers and then can get them an offer within 20 to 30 minutes after that phone call. So we’re jumping all over it and getting in front of everything.
Kristen Knapp (11:31)
Wow, so you’re like, you’re on your computer, you’re on your phone, you are available. Is that kind of like a full-time, like, round-the-clock job? Do the offers come in at any time?Jaben Makings (11:36)
Exactly. Exactly.They do and the thing about realtors is most of them work on the weekends, right? Cause that’s when clients are available to show houses the evenings and the weekend. So it is kind of an around the clock thing. The guys come in Monday through Friday, but they should be on their phones and on their computers a little bit throughout the weekend. Otherwise they’re going to miss out on solid opportunities.
Kristen Knapp (12:06)
Right, totally. And then when you go to, you know, do the deal, how are you making connections with all these investors?Jaben Makings (12:15)
So right now we, it’s a pretty exciting time because we are just now starting to build out the disposition side of our company. So before, I’m a really big proponent on not being a jack of all trades and master of none. I really think you should focus in and hone in on one thing and get really, really freaking good at it before going out and starting another thing. So the way I built Onnix was I’ve been waiting quite a while to build out the disposition side of our company. We’ve still seena ton of success without doing so. So we’ve just got really, really good at the acquisition side and building out the agent outreach. And now we’re finding to a point where we’re where I have the sales guys doing consistent deals without me. And so now I’m to go start building out the disposition side of the company and do it essentially the same thing that I just did with the acquisition side. But before we would use, you know, different disposition hubs to sell our deals and we had, you know, a few buyers, just some people in my in my network that we would sell.
deals to once in a while.
Kristen Knapp (13:15)
Yeah, and did you keep a lot of them?Jaben Makings (13:20)
Yeah, I did keep a couple of deals. mean, a lot of them would be through investors or through the disposition hubs, I would say. But now it’s gonna start flip-flopping a little bit more where most deals will hopefully be sold to our own investors. Therefore, the deal size will be up even more.Kristen Knapp (13:27)
Yeah. Yeah.That’s amazing. That’s so exciting to get that rolling and you guys have already seen such growth.
Jaben Makings (13:45)
Yes, we’re super excited for the future.Kristen Knapp (13:47)
So talk about maybe a time as you’ve been getting started where things didn’t really go as planned and how you had to pivot and learn from that.Jaben Makings (13:57)
Yeah, I think this spring it was super tough. Like I had a couple guys rolling with me on the sales side of things and I was slowly trying to work my way out of sales and I did it a little bit too soon. Like I didn’t realize that they needed to be having a lot more success. I was trying to time it out perfectly and that didn’t necessarily work out. So we had a really, really bad month back in May because of that. So I learned my lesson.that I needed to stay in sales until the guys were consistently doing several deals a month.
Kristen Knapp (14:33)
Yeah, yeah, you gotta pivot and yeah, make that happen. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And then talk about kind of the market right now. So I know there’s a lot of information being thrown at people about, you know, if they should go into the market, if they should wait, what’s your perspective on everything that’s going on?Jaben Makings (15:32)
Yeah, it’s it’s a really weird time and it’s getting better. Buta few months ago, we had sellers thinking that it’s 2021 where the market’s crazy and, you know, people are getting multiple offers. So the sellers want those prices and then the buyers think it’s 2008. So we had this this weird gap for a little bit where the buyers are really deep and the sellers aren’t wanting to come down. We’re kind of seeing the sellers finally come down a little bit and it kind of balance out. But if you will.
or thinking about getting into the market right now and starting your own company or getting into wholesaling or getting into investing, I don’t think there’s a better time to do it because there’s so many decent deals to be had. There’s a lot of people struggling right now. So there’s a lot of money to be made.
Kristen Knapp (16:14)
Yeah.Jaben Makings (16:19)
a few months ago, we had sellers thinking that it’s 2021 where the market’s crazy and, you know, people are getting multiple offers. So the sellers want those prices and then the buyers think it’s 2008. So we had this this weird gap for a little bit where the buyers are really deep and the sellers aren’t wanting to come down. We’re kind of seeing the sellers finally come down a little bit and it kind of balance out. But if you will.or thinking about getting into the market right now and starting your own company or getting into wholesaling or getting into investing, I don’t think there’s a better time to do it because there’s so many decent deals to be had. There’s a lot of people struggling right now. So there’s a lot of money to be made.
Kristen Knapp (16:57)
Yeah.Yeah, no, it’s good to have optimism about the market for sure. And then you’re in the Scottsdale area, so tell us about kind of that Phoenix area and what makes it special.
Jaben Makings (17:13)
Mm hmm. Well, we do deals in several different states. So Phoenix is kind of our primary one. And then North Carolina is a close second with how many deals we’re doing over there. And then we have Indianapolis and Texas we just moved into, which we’re not doing near as many deals over there as we are in Phoenix and North Carolina. But both Phoenix and North Carolina are amazing markets. There’s tons of people moving to them because of the beautiful climate. It’s just both of them havebig booming cities that are constantly expanding right now.
Kristen Knapp (17:47)
Yeah, yeah, I love Scottsdale. My sister used to live in Scottsdale, so I used to spend a lot of time there. Yeah, I mean, those are two great markets, and then you’re opening up in Texas as well. I feel like Texas has a lot of opportunity.Jaben Makings (18:00)
It really does. You know, you Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston, which are the two markets that we’re in, which are almost the same thing as Phoenix. There’s a ton of people moving down there.Kristen Knapp (18:11)
Yeah, and I bet it’s really important to the fact that you guys really know that area and you can really pick out the good deals for people.Jaben Makings (18:20)
Yes, most definitely. Definitely. takes a while to build up that knowledge. I think we have a really good edge in Phoenix just because of all the connections that we have here. So we know a ton about the market. We have second opinions on everything. I know in Phoenix, I can tell you if you give me two crossroads, I can pretty much tell you what a deal should sell for right in that area. And we’re getting close to that over in North Carolina as well, which isKristen Knapp (18:22)
Yeah.Jaben Makings (18:49)
which is awesome. It makes our comping way easier. It makes our deal success rate way better.Kristen Knapp (18:55)
Yeah, that’s awesome. And so if you were to give some advice, like what’s some advice that you wish you learned earlier in your career that you can share with us?Jaben Makings (19:06)
To stay focused. If I was just getting started and I could go back and give myself some advice, I would say to just stay focused, don’t get distracted with a million different things. Because I really, really struggled with that when I was a realtor several years ago. Every single one of my sales guys that’s come through here has struggled with the same thing. They have a million different business ideas. But I was the guy that was trying to start a new company every six months. So wanted to go drop ship, do Amazon FBA.you name it, I had thought about doing it and potentially had started doing it. And what that caused me to do was to never get good at the one thing that I was actually doing. So I would highly recommend to just hunker down on one thing and get really good at that for a couple of years and then you can start moving into other things. And that’s one of the tough things with TikTok and Instagram right now is you see so many reels and posts about
how all these millionaires have seven streams of income. you know, most of us people that are just scrolling and don’t actually have a company are like, man, I gotta go get seven streams of income if I wanna become a millionaire. But the truth is that for them to get those seven streams of income, they got really, really good at one thing. And then once they had a bunch of money, then they started investing into other different side hustles and different businesses.
Kristen Knapp (20:05)
Okay.When you were kind of thinking about all these different avenues to go down, what made wholesaling different and what made that actually stick for you?
Jaben Makings (20:38)
So I had a little bit of real estate experience, right, being an agent. And then it got me closer to what my goal was at the time, which was just owning a bunch of rental properties. So like I was saying before, you get to sell all of these off-market, fix and flip deals to investors. So you can kind of just cherry pick the best ones for yourself.Kristen Knapp (21:00)
that awesome well tell everybody where to find you and where to find OnnixJaben Makings (21:04)
Yeah, you can follow me on Instagram at @jaben_makings and ⁓ DM me the word coach and I’ll send you over a free blueprint on how I basically scaled to six figures and two years.Kristen Knapp (21:20)
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here, J-Ben. And thank you everybody for listening, and we will see you back next time. Bye.Jaben Makings (21:23)
Awesome, thanks so much, Kristen.
