Education & Experience: The Keys to Real Estate Success with Jerad Rakusek

Michael Stansbury (00:10.025)
Hello everybody and welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m Mike Stansbury, my guest today Jared Rokusek. Jared, how are you sir? Great sir, it’s a wonderful day here in Memphis and you are in South Dakota? All right sir.

Jerad Rokusek (00:28.311)
Good are you?

Jerad Rokusek (00:35.214)
Correct.

Michael Stansbury (00:37.131)
We’re going to get into your story in just second, but first we got to do a, we got to pay the bills here, Jared. We got to talk about investor fuel. At Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, and real estate entrepreneurs, two to five extra businesses to allow them to build the businesses they’ve always wanted and allow them to live the lives they’ve always dreamed of. Now Jared, I want to ask you, sir, what’s your origin story? How did you pivot into real estate? What were you doing beforehand? Give me the background. Before we get into what you’re doing today,

Tell us a little bit about the journey.

Jerad Rokusek (01:11.095)
Well, I bought my first rental property in 1997. So I was buying houses, renting them out. And then the tenants were damaging them. So then I started fixing them. And then I started selling them after I fixed them. I’ve done a lot of, a lot of different things. I’ve owner finance properties for people, lease option properties for people. I bought commercial buildings and re, re subdivided them.

new construction, you kind of name it, I’ve kind of done it.

Michael Stansbury (01:44.023)
in the world of real estate. What were you doing before real estate or like while you were doing these things, kind of what other businesses or ventures or things like that kind of helped shape you where you are today?

Jerad Rokusek (01:55.309)
Well, back in 95 to 2000, I worked at Gateway 2000, or Gateway. was now called Sales. then, pardon me.

Michael Stansbury (02:03.447)
That was the old computer.

computer gateway? Okay, alright.

Jerad Rokusek (02:11.308)
And after that, I was a stockbroker for a very short period of time until 2001. And then after that, it’s kind of been full-time real estate.

Michael Stansbury (02:20.033)
Okay, awesome. So since 2001, full-time real estate and your market there, tell us a little bit about your market. How does it work there in South Dakota? Do you do a lot of rule houses? Are you in the cities? What is your footprint there?

Jerad Rokusek (02:36.652)
Well, I’m in Sioux Falls. It’s the biggest city in the state. It’s about 240,000 people and you have another 40,000, 50,000 around there. So 98 % of mine are in the city limits of Sioux Falls. I don’t do much rural because once you get outside of that area, it is really rural.

Michael Stansbury (02:57.591)
can imagine. I’ve never been to South Dakota. I know where it is on the map, I understand exactly what you’re saying as far as the rule-ness of that state. So since then, how does your operation look like? How did it look like 10 years ago? Compare 10 years ago to today. What does your operation look like?

Jerad Rokusek (03:21.15)
Well, 10 years ago, I was doing everything myself. You know, I’d fix the self, fix the toilets, do this, do that. Now, I don’t do any of that. I have people that do it. I don’t have any employees, but I have, you know, handymen that are 1099. They go do this, this and this. I have painters that do that. Electricians that do this. HVAC that does that. Everybody has their different areas. And I go in, I look at a house, I buy the house. I go do a scope of work.

You know, I send the painter in here, you come in this time, I need this patched on this thing. Electricians come in this time. HVAC does this. And then at the end, carpet and cleaners. And then it gets listed and we move on to the next one.

Michael Stansbury (04:03.669)
Yeah, Rinson Repeat, Jared. So what is your deal flow look like? How are you marketing there in South Dakota, in Sioux Falls? Or how does your marketing machine work? How are you getting your leads,

Jerad Rokusek (04:17.721)
Right now I’m getting a lot of it from wholesalers, but I’m also doing direct mail. So.

Michael Stansbury (04:24.599)
Has DirectMail been a staple for you for a while or?

Jerad Rokusek (04:27.658)
You know, it’s worked a lot. Everyone says, it doesn’t work. Well, it’s worked for me thousands of times. So I’m not going to say.

Michael Stansbury (04:34.135)
I always feel like the people that do direct mail, they do it for a season and they don’t get the fruit of doing it consistently and having the long term approach. How would you describe it?

Jerad Rokusek (04:50.507)
Yeah, people will say, oh, geez, it didn’t work. I sent out mailers. They’ll say, well, how many did you send out? Oh, we sent out 388. That’s not going to get you wet. You got to have at least 5,000 to get a good sample size, and it’s just repeat. You send it out, and then six weeks later, send it out again and again. I’ll get people that’ll call about a mail that I sent out four years ago that I kept on the fridge.

Michael Stansbury (05:10.451)
Isn’t that the truth? So one of the things that happens in this thing is that I’ve consistently tell people that when we’re doing some sort of probate, I look at the letter that I sent and the date that I sent it and it’s wild to me that I can see a letter, a postcard from 2019 and we get the appointment from it because what I feel about

especially that demographic is they keep everything and so I they weren’t even on my mail list this year or last year but they kept it from a time when they were like yeah maybe I need to use this one day so that’s the benefit of direct mail so and I love it you’ve been in business for for a long time so you know that as a a staple for your business any other ways of marketing besides wholesalers and direct mail that you are getting your leads

Jerad Rokusek (06:04.725)
Well, started to wander into the Google world. Google adwords click. That’s the analytics you think you haven’t figured out and they change them on you. So it’s just nature the beast.

Michael Stansbury (06:15.273)
Yeah, the paper clip. Yes, sir. And so this is a full time for you. This is all that you do now is flipping houses and buying property for long term investment.

Jerad Rokusek (06:27.348)
Correct.

Michael Stansbury (06:28.607)
Okay, any other assets that you go out there and buy Jared?

Jerad Rokusek (06:33.323)
Well, I’ll buy about anything it seems like if there’s going to be profit in it. Right now we’re working on climate controlled storage units converting call centers into that. So that’s my project that I’m kind of got on the front burner right now.

Michael Stansbury (06:51.223)
Okay, so you’re taking old commercial buildings that were call centers and reimagining them as self-storage facilities.

Jerad Rokusek (06:59.723)
Climate controlled, yes.

Michael Stansbury (07:00.855)
Lignment control? Okay, cool. are you just, is that beginning to take shape or how far along are you in that process?

Jerad Rokusek (07:10.218)
Well, it’s been a long process buying this last building. We’re in the home stretch now. We’re getting the final bids in for everything else, but it’ll be worth it when it’s all done.

Michael Stansbury (07:19.561)
Yeah, self-storage is good little asset class. Yeah, tell me a little bit about you, like, real estate, what’s your family like? What does life look like for Jared as far as what are fun things to do in South Dakota if we were to go there?

Jerad Rokusek (07:33.226)
Well, in the summertime, we go down to Yankton and we have a sailboat down there. So we stay out on the weekends on the sailboat and sail, um, hang out with, you know, friends on the dock and jet ski and whatnot of the summertime. And then the winter time, just kind of find some place warm to go. It’s not here.

Michael Stansbury (07:54.831)
What’s the winter like as far as months are concerned? I have buddies that live in Minnesota in the UP and I don’t see how they do it because I think it’s a sixth, seventh or eighth, know, seven months out of the year they’re really cold. What does it look like in South Dakota?

Jerad Rokusek (08:07.912)
Well, you get to December and that’s about the last warm month. You’ll get temperatures around that mid twenties, thirties. But when we get to January, then you get the negatives and February would be negative 30. And so my goal for my freedom is I want to spend more time from January 1st through March 1st, March 31st away from here. you can.

Michael Stansbury (08:29.013)
Yeah, where is it going to be Jared?

Jerad Rokusek (08:31.721)
Usually we go down to Mexico a couple of times a year down there, and then I like playing poker. So I go to Vegas, you know, 10 days, 10 days at a time and play cards and come back and make sure things run the way it should. And then I’ll go back down again.

Michael Stansbury (08:47.371)
Yeah, so that’s a good question too about South Dakota and like some of these cities. Like what does it do to your inventory? Because in Memphis, in Memphis we can sell and we can do construction all throughout every season. Does it hinder you at all like for your projects? How does the weather affect you on that?

Jerad Rokusek (09:08.457)
Well, the weather kind of plays in my favor because most of my stuff will be indoor work. I mean, obviously we can’t paint, but people know when to buy a house in January, you can’t paint it until at least April. So I’m able then to get more contractors to come in to do stuff on the inside because it’s too cold to be outside.

Michael Stansbury (09:25.173)
Yeah, I like it. So you’ve tailored the way that you buy properties and what you’re looking for to make sure that you can weather the weather. That’s great.

Jerad Rokusek (09:33.641)
There’s always a rush at the end of October, first part of November to buy your houses and get them painted so that they’re done before the weather hits. Then you can go inside and finish them up.

Michael Stansbury (09:46.679)
So what is the driver economically for your town? What drives the economics? Is it in the last two or three years have you seen growth? Are you guys steady there? Or what’s it look like,

Jerad Rokusek (10:01.523)
Well, during COVID, we were open. We didn’t close anything. And you wouldn’t believe how many people are coming from other states because of that. I mean, we didn’t shut anything down. Our governor said, no, we’re open for business. And we were. We’re buying and we’re selling. We had a sluggish real estate market at first, then it opened up and it became a buyer, a seller’s market, know, times 10. They’re going on the market and they were getting offers. Same day, multiple offers.

you buying them boom next, next, next, next, so.

Michael Stansbury (10:35.423)
Yeah. Well, Jerry, let me ask you this. Where did you learn? Were you part of any coaching program, mastermind, mentorship, you know, with regard to real estate to kind of learn? Or did you kind of learn by just doing what did the education look like?

Jerad Rokusek (10:50.173)
Well, I learned a lot by trial and error and I did a lot of audio books. This is way before podcasts for even a thing. I, have been members of seven FF, seven figure flipping. I enjoyed that one there and I’m also a member of a pace, more B sub two. just for simple fact to be around other people that do what I do.

Michael Stansbury (11:10.069)
Right, yeah. And would you say that being part of those groups have helped you with different ways of buying property, creative ways? How would you describe, one of the things that we try to convey is the power of being in a group of like-minded people that are doing something similar and going in the same direction. What have you found been the most beneficial part of being a part of those programs?

Jerad Rokusek (11:37.96)
I’m hearing what other people are doing in different markets. You know, this is working. This isn’t working. Don’t do this. We tried this. This works. You kind of speed up the process because now you’re learning about stuff that they’re doing today, not six months ago. And then you can go back and you can implement it and you could go, Hey, this list is really good. I’ve had good success with this. You could download it, buy it. Boom. You can, you know, have it shipped out in three days.

Michael Stansbury (12:05.259)
Yep, I like it. And so that’s it. You’re getting exposed to ideas and things you wouldn’t normally, and then you’re able to take action on those. And so the great thing about those, especially you, is you hear something, all right, I’m going to implement that and test it and see if it works for me, which is awesome. Well, Jared, let me ask you this final question. Tell us a create the last kind of maybe, and I’ll let you choose your own adventure here.

the last creative deal that you did or maybe a flip that didn’t go well, tell us maybe a nightmare situation. Again, you can pick from any of those that you can pick. You don’t have to choose the nightmare situation, because I don’t want you getting PTSD from this podcast, but whatever you like.

Jerad Rokusek (12:49.522)
Well, I had one where I was buying a house and we’re going to do sub two. They, they agreed to basically carry $50,000 of equity back and I was going to buy the house, take over their mortgage. They were three to four months behind going into foreclosure. So I made them current, agreed to make their payments for them. That went along okay for about six months. And then she decided she wanted some money and I said, well, you know, we already had an agreement.

It’s kind of sad, it’s almost the way it is. Long story short, she took 10 grand to knock $50,000 off of her equity. So I wrote her a check for $10,000 and now the house, I went through it. Now the tenant has moved out, so we’re just gonna flip the house. So instead of having a $15,000 profit margin, now it’s about 65.

Michael Stansbury (13:35.894)
Okay.

Michael Stansbury (13:41.135)
Well, you can’t beat that. Sometimes people get in a bind, but you’re always providing that solution. That’s pretty cool. Well, Jared, we appreciate you being on the Real Estate Pros podcast. If people want to find out more about what you do maybe than your market, where can they find you on the web? Where are you located at?

Jerad Rokusek (13:42.79)
Listen.

Jerad Rokusek (14:01.988)
Well, I really do not have much of a web presence. I’ve been so busy just working at this and that I haven’t had time to set up any of that stuff. I’m not on Instagram. I’m not on Snapchat.

Michael Stansbury (14:14.561)
Good, yeah, that’s not terrible Jared. But you do have a Facebook page and you do have a LinkedIn account.

Jerad Rokusek (14:22.15)
I do have a Facebook page,

Michael Stansbury (14:23.895)
Alright, well we’ve got that information Jared and we’ll put that below in the show notes. If anybody’s doing business in South Dakota, if you’re a wholesaler, Jared’s obviously buying in that market and love to buy your stuff more than likely because I get it, you’re probably a wholesaler’s best friend when you’re able to take down property. Well Jared, any final thoughts for our audience on the Real Estate Pros podcast?

Jerad Rokusek (14:50.438)
No, I appreciate you having me on the show.

Michael Stansbury (14:52.757)
Yes sir, thank you guys. I appreciate you guys watching the Real Estate Pros Podcast. Again, all the information about Jared will be below and thanks for watching. Do all the things, like, comment, subscribe and we’ll see you next time on the Real Estate Pros Podcast.