Creative Foreclosure Deals: How Abhi Agrawal Shares Profits with Sellers

Quentin Edmonds (01:31)
everyone, welcome to the Investor Fuel podcast. I am your host, Quentin Edmonds, better known as Q, you know how we do. And today I am joined by someone I’ve been looking forward to chatting to, chatting with, not chatting to, chatting with, and that’s my friend Abhi, who’s making some serious moves in the real estate business with single family homes. And I love his approach when it comes to talking about

Maybe some equity partnership. Hopefully I can him to talk about that for a little bit today. And so I’m so glad to have you here. I’ll be, how are you feeling today,

Abhi Agrawal (02:04)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me in this podcast. I’m so excited to talk to you, chat with you and share some some learnings that I learned over the past one year. I’m so excited to be here.

Quentin Edmonds (02:18)
Absolutely, absolutely. I know our listeners are really going to take something away. Definitely from your approach when it comes to educating people, the fact how you like to help people maybe not get into some pitfalls and avoid some pitfalls and how you’ve learned some stuff and you want to educate them so they can learn to avoid some of the stuff that maybe you got yourself into. So I’m looking forward to you talking about that and educating the people. so Abhi, if you don’t mind, man, let’s dive in. So first off,

for people who may not be familiar with your world, give us a short version of what it is that you are main, like what’s your main focus these days?

Abhi Agrawal (02:55)
Absolutely. So as you know, my name is Abhi. I predominantly focus on single family houses in Texas. And my approach is always evaluate the deal and come up with a solution that is win-win for both owners and us. You cannot have only your win. You need to keep what they are looking out for.

So that’s my focus, single family houses across Texas and trying to help as many owners as I can.

Quentin Edmonds (03:21)
Absolutely, absolutely. love how you was telling me how you like to educate people and you told me that maybe sometimes y’all get very creative with kind of what you do. And so tell me a little bit more about that creativity that you do.

Abhi Agrawal (03:36)
Right, so generally what happens is in case of full closure is a perfect example, right? Where homeowners sometimes have a lot of equity and they are, let’s say behind by 50, 60 grand and there is an equity of 200, 250K, right? So generally the cash offers to them is around 70 cents a dollar, right? 70 % of market value minus repairs.

And this is where we come up with a solution where it creates a win-win solution for them. And we call it equity partnership where what we do is we reinstate loan for them. We also give them upfront money so that they can move out to a better place and start working on or do a fresh start. And then we fix and flip and sell the house. And we have a joint equity partnership with the owner. So once we sell the house, we give them rest of their proceeds.

So this helps them in stopping the foreclosure. We continue to make payments on their behalf until property is sold. They get some upfront money as well so that they can start their journey. And then we take all the responsibility. And the best thing is we are generous in sharing the profit. We don’t mind sharing profit. And it kind of create a really good solution for the owners because where everybody is offering 50, 60, 70 cents a dollar.

Here we are coming up with an approach that we genuinely want to help you out. And we also want to safeguard our investment. So this approach works really well when there is a foreclosure or even when there is no foreclosure, right? When homeowners have a lot of equity and they want to get maximum out of it. That’s where we propose these kinds of solutions where we do equity split with the owner themselves, right?

for us is we don’t have to bring a lot of money to the table. So let’s say the mortgage is 300,000. I don’t have to bring 300,000. I just need to bring enough to reinstate and give them upfront equity. I’m reducing my cost of money because I would have to pay 12 % two points. So I’m reducing that cost and then helping homeowner as well in moving out faster and sharing the split later on.

Quentin Edmonds (06:29)
No, absolutely, man. That’s great. That’s amazing. I know it can’t always be easy in this climate when you’re doing business and you’re making money. sometimes that can be kind of where you want to… No, I’m not going to say it like that. It’s just what I appreciate about what you’re doing in this climate is that you’re not trying to get over on people.

You’re trying to put them in a position where there is a win-win. And that’s what I was trying to say. Sometimes it’s not easy for people to make that decision, but I’m glad that you are making that decision. Because sometimes it’s like, just give me more about more that I can have. But no, it’s like, no, I’m not trying to do that in this climate. I want to make sure that we all win. I want to make sure that everybody’s profitable.

Abhi Agrawal (07:11)
Exactly. I love that. Yeah. And that’s, that’s always been the focus, right? As I started doing it, I realized like, you cannot win if you don’t have your heart in right place. You have to think about them. And that’s why like I call my company good deeds because I genuinely believe in that and try to create a solution that is like genuinely win win for everyone.

Quentin Edmonds (07:12)
Exactly.

Absolutely. Nope. I love it, man. I love it. So this kind of transitioned me into my next question. What’s been the key to keeping that machine running smoothly?

Abhi Agrawal (07:42)
So I got to learn early on when I started my journey last March, the key to run the engine is marketing. So you have to focus on marketing. Without marketing, you don’t have leads. Without leads, you cannot help anyone. So I started, I understood that part, that 70, 80 % of your money is generally on marketing when you have your budget.

So that’s, I started doing that a lot. So focus on marketing different channels, how you can reach out, how you can show up to the owners. That was one part of the business. And as I’m doing more, I am also realizing that you can scale onto only to certain level if you are putting your own money into marketing, you need to also have relationships and network with others who are looking for help. So they should start bringing their deals to us.

where we can help them out in learning the process and as well as helping them in closing the deals. So these two things are running my engine right now.

Quentin Edmonds (08:38)
I love it. I love it. Absolutely, man. You’re doing it the right way. You’re doing it the smart way. I appreciate it, man. Like you put an insight. Now let me ask you this. know, there comes a time when kind of things get real. Maybe like a deal goes sideways or a time when you had to pivot fast. You mind sharing one of those moments with us?

Abhi Agrawal (08:57)
Yeah, absolutely. I can share one of the most complex deals that I did recently. So through our marketing, one seller reached out to us and he said, my house is going into foreclosure. So I explained that equity partnership thing and he signed a contract with me. Three days later, my marketing, when I was searching him in my marketing system, I saw like there are 12 properties.

which are going into foreclosure. So I called this guy, said, hey, you told me this one is going, but I see like 12 properties are going into foreclosure, what’s going on? And he told me that these all are cross-collateralized. So single property cannot be sold. All entire debt, 1 million debt needs to be paid. And then I got to know, had like two and a half, three weeks to execute this strategy. So I said, look, I’m going to help you out.

Tell me what you’re looking for. So he said, you can sell nine properties. I just want to say three properties. One is my home office and two properties that I really like. And if you don’t give me anything, that’s fine. And I said, OK, I’ll take up this challenge. So what we did is we find out nine different buyers for these nine properties within two weeks. And we closed every single one on the last day of the foreclosure. We paid one million to the bank.

saved three properties for him around $2.4 million. We also gave him $100,000

his pocket. So it was really challenging because like you have to balance the HUD because bank wants entire money. They were not giving individual balances. So you have to check all the HUD properties to make sure the bank gets their money. Plus there were coordination required because some of the properties had tenants. They cannot move out in two weeks.

So the lease back and everything. like three, four days were like sleepless where I had to work constantly on the deals. And I was fortunate that I had a really good dispute team who just kept doing their part of the work, finding the buyers, negotiating, getting EMD. So sometimes you get deals like this where there is a huge responsibility on you to save the homeowner from losing 12 properties. So it’s a huge responsibility, but

If you put all your efforts and heart, I’m pretty sure that you’ll receive success and you will be able to help out homeowners.

Quentin Edmonds (11:50)
Absolutely, man. That’s a great story. And that’s the kind of stuff people don’t talk about enough. And honestly, this is what separates the folks from just who dabble and those who kind of stay in in long term. So yeah, you’re doing it the right way. I appreciate it. So let me ask you this. What are you most focused on solving or scaling up next? What’s the next goal for you?

Abhi Agrawal (12:14)
So when I started like last year, it was more like learning the process, learning the deals, learning everything, right? Now this year I have my certain dollar value target that I want to achieve. And just to give you some background, before I started doing this full time, I was doing tech. Like I was working in Google before I quit everything, all the tech industry and then jumped into this, right? So it was a really cool job.

But then after working for 15 years in tech industry, just entirely quit that and started doing something that I did not know. So I was coming to my target for this year. So I have certain dollar value that I want to achieve. But along the way, I also want to make sure that I’m helping as many people as I can, right? Be it homeowners, other people who are learning the same thing who are going through the journey. So my target for this year is achieve that.

target that I have set it up for myself, plus educate more people and help more homeowners this year. And next year, obviously, I’ll try to grow further. But this year, I’m pretty much set on what I want to achieve.

Quentin Edmonds (13:19)
Absolutely. Now that’s big. That’s big, especially when you have something set in place. You got the engine running smoothly, but then also you’re like, listen, I’m not going to just stay here. There are goals because I want to help more people. And so that’s beautiful. Now we know like the next move, can either compound things or create chaos. And that’s depending on how you play it. So now I know a lot of people out here that listening and they’re either in their journey or they’re looking to level up.

And I think they’ll benefit from hearing this. So let me ask when it comes to building relationships and growing your network, what’s made the biggest difference for you?

Abhi Agrawal (13:55)
So what I realized is to learn, you have to be open and you have to be able to reach out to people, right? With mindset that they are all there to teach you. If you have that mindset, people who are doing great, I have seen they have given me time, they have given me their knowledge. And best way of learning that I realized is doing deals with them. Do deals with people who are doing deals, who know how to evaluate, who know how to

run the entire project. I learned a lot of my whatever I learned, I learned lot through working with these people who helped me in negotiating the deal, how to talk to the owners, how to do the analysis. So those who are starting the journey, always feel free to reach out those who are doing a lot of deals who know how to evaluate deals, how to talk to homeowners and don’t be afraid of taking shots.

Let’s say if somebody is not available, take your shot, call that homeowner, make a conversation. And I don’t shy away saying that, I don’t know about this. I need to check with my partner or I need to check with my team. And that’s perfectly OK. I failed a lot of times before I started getting success. And that’s the thing that everyone needs to keep in mind. Competition is everywhere. You will see a lot of competition. But there are certain deals that are just for you.

And you get these, you just need to learn with the people who know this stuff.

Quentin Edmonds (15:19)
Yeah. Yeah. No, I love it, man. I know one of the things we talked about before we got on

talking about how you wanted to differentiate yourself. And I think you are positioning yourself to differentiate yourself by the relationships that you’re building in a way that you want to make sure you see people win. And so you can’t fake that. think relationships are everything in this space. And so you are doing it. Yeah. You’re doing it absolutely the right way, And so listen, we’re coming close, close up to rap.

But before I probably got maybe two more questions. And so this one question I want to ask you is, is there anything that you have been thinking of lately that maybe you want to share with our audience, maybe something close to the heart or something? Because I know you like to educate, maybe something that you can educate on or a tip you can give them or a tool you can give them. Anything comes to mind that maybe you can share with the people at this point?

Abhi Agrawal (16:51)
Yeah, I think what I realized from my journey is when you start the journey, it’s going to be tough. There will be times, there will be months when you are not getting any deals. People are not talking to you. The thing that helped me in this journey is obviously family support is very, very important. Let’s don’t lose hope. Just keep trying. If you keep trying, if you’re persistent, you would see success. There is no doubt about that. So keep learning. Keep trying. Working with

work with the people who know stuff and you definitely need to have your family support if you are starting out and looking to succeed in this journey.

Quentin Edmonds (17:29)
Absolutely. Thank you for that, Abhi. That’s good. I think that’s good advice. I think that’s encouraging advice. I think that’s very motivating advice. So thank you so much for that. So listen, before we wrap, if someone wanted to reach out to you and connect with you or maybe collaborate with you and learn more about what you’re doing, what’s a way for them to reach out to you? And please drop that beautiful name again in your business because it’s so great.

Abhi Agrawal (17:53)
Absolutely. So my company is Good Deeds. You can reach out to me over my email ID. That’s the best way. Or on Facebook, can search Abhi Agrawal. I don’t know how many you will get, but email ID is gooddeeds.res.gmail.com. It is gooddeeds.r as in real, e as in estate, as in real estate solutions. res.gmail.com.

Quentin Edmonds (18:19)
Absolutely, absolutely. Thank you for that, man. Again, I appreciate your story. I appreciate your time. I appreciate your perspective. Good Deeds, you are definitely up to good deeds. I think that is the perfect name for you and your company. So just thank you for what you’re doing. We need more people like you in this space that are doing things the right way, that are educating, that have integrity about what you’re doing. I really, really appreciate what you’re doing, Avi.

Abhi Agrawal (18:46)
Thank you, thank you for asking all these amazing questions. Let me express myself, share my ideas, thoughts, and I really appreciate that you have invited me in this podcast.

Quentin Edmonds (18:57)
Absolutely, absolutely. Well, listen, everyone, for those who tuning in, I thank you. And if you value this, you have to subscribe. You got to make sure you subscribe because we have more conversation coming up with operators just like I.B. who’s doing things the right way, building their business the right way and have integrity about what they’re doing. So listen, until next time, we’ll see you. You have a great one.