From Cold Calls to $6M Deals: Real Estate Growth with Josh Brown

Josh Brown (00:00)
We found a 72 unit apartment complex down here in McAllen that we actually locked up ourselves. We got it for, we locked it up for 2.8. We did a, renovated, and we structured our own deal. We raised over a million dollars as our first indication for that deal. We did a refinance on it, and that deal now is worth over nearly six million dollars. So we did we really doubled the value of that deal. That deal came from cold calling. One call, I think we had already made like, and it’s because we would hit every single property regardless of what it was.

Kristen Knapp (02:03)
Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m Krista Knapp and I’m here with Josh Brown, who’s the co-founder of Capital Advisors and Associates. We’re gonna get all into what this company’s up to. They’ve had exponential growth over the last year. So thank you for being here, Josh.

Josh Brown (02:17)
Thanks, Kristen Morning. Yeah, I’m really excited for ⁓ you being part of the podcast and whatnot. But yeah, we can get into it for sure.

Kristen Knapp (02:21)
Amazing. Good morning.

Amazing. starting at the beginning, what kind of drew you into real estate?

Josh Brown (02:31)
I’ve been in real estate since like right out of high school. So I got my real estate license straight out of high school. So my family had a construction company back then.

Kristen Knapp (02:39)
in high

speed.

Josh Brown (02:40)
And so I kind of started

getting involved, learning how to build out, how to build homes back then. And from there, uh, just slowly over time, after learning how to do that, buying some of your properties, I started buying my own property and started building my own houses. So I built my first house, I got 22. And then from there just kept on going. Yeah. So.

Kristen Knapp (02:57)
Whoa.

Josh Brown (02:59)
And then now fast forward, I’m 28 now and I started a company with one of my friends and we’ve been going full force with it ever since. So it’s been three years of us starting Capital Advisor and Associates. And it’s been a massive blessing for both of us. We started just as a two man team and now we’ve grown to over 19 people in our company. So we started off with just actually wholesaling.

And went from wholesaling to actually buying and from buying to actually building and then doing multi-family and now we’re just doing everything all together. So we have a lot of, we’re in a lot of different departments, like a lot of different areas in our local economy, local market.

Kristen Knapp (03:34)
Wow,

you’ve done a lot in a relatively short amount of time. You’re still so young. So take me back to when you first got into real estate, like right out of high school. When did you first realize that this could maybe be your career?

Josh Brown (03:36)
Yeah.

Good question. So I remember my family they had a local lender that was a good friend to them for their homes and stuff and I didn’t really know much about real estate back then but he told me like hey like He was showing me like a simple calculator like hey this how much you can make like a commission is what you can make as an agent He’s actually like a $6,000 commission. You make this like on 200 hours or whatever

And I was like, oh, that’s a lot when I was 18. so I got into it because just like, oh, you can work your own hours. You can manage your own time. And it pays relatively well for the amount of work that it is.

Obviously, it’s more than just that. It’s been a massive amount of work, more than I expected. Now, I run my own company and run everything. It’s been basically 24-7, so every day I’m getting after it. now that we have everything systematized, we have managers, we have people in their certain places, it’s not all hours of the day for me anymore, but it was like that for sure. It still is from time to time for sure.

Kristen Knapp (04:31)
Yeah. ⁓

That’s something I hear from a lot of people where they enter real estate because of the flexibility and you get to make your own hours and you realize you’re just working all the time.

Josh Brown (04:56)
Yeah, yeah, and there’s kind of like the, yeah, there’s that, how would you say it? Not stigma, but like people think that, it’s a laptop lifestyle. You know, I just work my own.

my own hours, I’ll go to the gym at 11 and I’ll just work for three hours a day.

No, like we were actually like really strict and we still are a little bit more flexible, but we were like, Hey, everyone has to show up at eight 30 in the morning. All the team members, if you don’t show up within 10 minutes, you’re to get a ride up and you have to stay there till like six. So it’s like a full, it’s a full like nine to five, eight to six job that we’re really strict with. And we got a lot of results. Like we closed, uh, I think our first year we did like 50 plus deals and then our second year

Kristen Knapp (06:14)
Yeah.

Josh Brown (06:21)
Second

year we did like 90 plus deals, 90 plus closings, just within our brokerage side, separate from all of our investments and stuff. we’ve been, we have been, we’ve been very aggressive, really strict with ourselves, being disciplined and just having that leadership with everyone. So really leading these people to see the vision and stick to it.

Kristen Knapp (06:38)
Yeah.

Yet you really can’t replicate in-person proximity. When everybody’s together, when everyone’s motivated, being creative, doing deals, it’s hard to do that when everybody’s remote on their laptops.

Josh Brown (06:52)
Yeah, 100%.

People, it’s just, we have some people that want to, they do work outside, but it’s completely different. When you’re actually in the office, and we have like an open, we have like an open office where it’s like all glass, so everyone can see each other in the office. And like, you’re get hands-on experience being there in front of us, like locking up deals, and like, if you have a question, we’re right there, everyone’s right there helping each other out. And every day, like, we, I think on any given day, we probably make anywhere from like 25 to 35 offers or so daily, so we’re always just sending offers on

properties.

And so we, you know, if you’re wanting to learn, that’s way to learn. gotta be there hands on with everyone, seeing what is it they’re trying to lock up, what does it make sense to lock it up? And you just start learning. then we have these, you know, now like we’re in, we’ve been pretty involved in the multifamily space. And now we just have these conversations open ended in the office where everyone’s listening of these big million dollar, multi-million dollar deals. Like we’re closing on an 81 unit on Monday. And it’s like a 4.5 million dollar deal.

we started from the very beginning there in that office like where we were at and so just everyone watching how we structure that.

Kristen Knapp (07:57)
That’s amazing. Yeah, it seems like you guys have been able to scale to, you know, a lot of units from launching this company.

Josh Brown (08:03)
Yeah, so it’s pretty interesting. like I bought my first property a couple years back and I’ve only ever owned like personally like three or four properties at a time. And then finally I went to

We went to a networking event in San Antonio where David Tupin was hosting a real estate event and we were in this room and was bunch of young guys just talking about these big multi-family deals and they were young, like 25, 26, 23, talking about, oh, I’m trying to lock up this suit for three million, two million. And it just opened up my mind of what’s possible and I kid you not, six months later from that.

Kristen Knapp (08:36)
Right.

Josh Brown (08:38)
You know, with that being my radar,

we found a 72 unit apartment complex down here in McAllen that we actually locked up ourselves. We got it for, we locked it up for 2.8. We did a, renovated, did a whole value add deal with it.

And we structured our own deal. We raised over a million dollars as our first indication for that deal. And we did a cash out refinance just I think last year, like last October, we did a refinance on it. And that deal now is worth over nearly six million dollars. So we did we really doubled the value of that deal. So but that deal came from cold calling. It was an old seller, an old guy from from Austin. But I would say before that

Kristen Knapp (09:12)
Mm.

Josh Brown (09:17)
one call, I think we had already made like, and it’s because we would hit every single property regardless of what it was.

So we didn’t really have that much strategy. Our strategy was just like, let’s just cast a net and let’s just call everyone and see what we can lock up. And we actually, I think up to that point we had already made probably like 15,000 phone calls or so between me and Angel. So it was just a matter of time before something.

Kristen Knapp (09:29)
Yeah.

Josh Brown (09:37)
big would hit. So and we have a saying we have a saying in our office we have it in we have it on our glass like one of our in a part of our office this is one phone call can change your life because that’s way it is like that that deal will change my life and show me like what’s possible and the exponentially grew our portfolio. So I think that’s that that’s how we started. Yeah. And then from there we just kept on going.

Kristen Knapp (09:50)
Yeah.

Yeah. That’s amazing. mean, I feel like I talk to so many people, and that’s why I like doing this kind of like shed light on different types of stories and what’s possible. And it sounds like you found out pretty early on that it is a mindset shift, that you have to be open to receiving everything. Like, you can’t limit yourself on what you’re capable of doing.

Josh Brown (10:52)
Yeah, yeah. think what I think what it takes is it’s a lot, especially with us, like we didn’t go in with like, we came in with the attention just doing wholesaling. It’s really easy to do. Like there’s not, it’s a little barrier entry, right? It’s like what a lot of people start off with. And even with that, I think it takes a lot of grit. Like I think within our company we’ve made now, like collectively, I think we’ve done like a hundred and

30,000 phone calls, like between everyone in our company and our team. So it’s a lot of phone calls. And the thing is like a lot of people don’t want to the calls. that’s where all the, for us, that’s where we see all the success is actually cold-calling people and getting rejected over and over and over. Uh, you know, and it’s, you just have to, you just have to have that grit and that mindset to keep on going, to be resilient. And eventually, you know, the tide will turn, things will turn better in your favor.

as as you keep on shipping at it. So I think it’s a really big thing just having that career for sure.

Kristen Knapp (11:42)
Yeah.

Yeah, and the best way to get comfortable with rejection is to be rejected. Sometimes on a big scale when you’re doing a lot of calls.

Josh Brown (11:49)
Yeah.

100 % and so like all of our guys like they’re really used to it now. They’ve all been so used to it now So, you know, it’s normal to get rejected probably like I don’t know 40 50 times On any given day from these sellers to a lot more cold calling we have a whole system We have like two separate teams that call

Kristen Knapp (11:53)
and

Red.

Josh Brown (12:11)
And we have some guys that call like the warmer leads and other guys that call just the cold, cold leads. So there’s a certain way we have set up so it’s a lot easier. But yeah, on any given day, we’d probably send anywhere from 25 to like 25, 35 offers or so on a daily basis.

Kristen Knapp (12:16)
Mm-hmm.

That’s amazing and you have 19 people at the company. How do you kind of go about hiring?

Josh Brown (12:28)
Yeah, so we’re really big. learned about our core values, right? So before we’re onboarding anyone, me and Angel sat down and we really thought about what characteristics do we want, what characteristics, what values are really important to us that we would want in an employee or a ⁓ team member, right?

And we came up with a few and several. So one being faith, one that they have got in their life, that they’re Kristen that they do have some sort of faith in their life, that they’re involved. No one being respect, resilience, commitment, humility. So major one too, not having a big head, leaving your ego at the door, being trainable.

Kristen Knapp (13:07)
Mm-hmm.

Josh Brown (13:07)
And there’s like two more, I think we’re like seven core values, but basically we have our interviewing process.

Where we kind of ask them certain questions about them, their core values, like ⁓ what are their opinions on integrity? I integrity is another one. Like what do they think of that? What’s their opinion? And also our respect. we kind of go really detailed into the interview process. then from there, we kind of do like a trial period, you would say, for like two weeks just to see how they are with the team. And from there, we either keep them on for another 30 days and just keep on doing trials until I think the 90th days when they’re officially with us.

full-time. you don’t really get to know someone right off of one interview. You get to know them over a little bit of time. so I think it’s we’ve been really careful to select who we let into our company. And there’s a certain characteristic. feel like all the guys we have in our company, they’re all serious in a good way. If cold calling is the hardest part of your life, then you’re not going to do it.

you know, that should be like the easiest thing for you. So like all of our guys, like they’ve been through things, they’ve gone through some hardships and this is like their best way of like managing to move forward. then a lot of our guys, you know, they have kids, they have families, they have wives. So we don’t really have any young people in our company, like not, you know, no one’s below like, I would say like 24, 25. And if they are, they have kids. And cause we notice like when they do, they work a lot harder. If you have a family, you’re going to work crazy hard. So.

Kristen Knapp (14:30)
you

Josh Brown (14:31)
Yeah, that’s the difference we’ve seen. Because we’ve seen a lot of people that we hire that are young, and then they’re out drinking, or they show up late. And we’re not going to deal with that. You get one warning, if you mess it up, you mess it up. So we’ve been pretty strict with that, for sure.

Kristen Knapp (15:29)
Yeah, it seems like you guys really take your time with hiring and really make sure that it’s a culture fit.

Josh Brown (15:33)
Yeah, 100%.

Kristen Knapp (15:34)
I love that. And then I’d love to get into kind of the different ways that you guys, like for your clients, you offer a lot of ways for them to get involved based on their risk preference. Can you kind of go through some of those different options?

Josh Brown (15:47)
Yeah, so we have.

It all depends on the client, like what, what they want to do. some, like we have some like older clients that they just want passive income. They want something secure. So what we do with them is we actually put them like on, on a, I would say it’s like a blind pool fund debt partnership where they, we actually tie their funds to a specific multifamily property that we have active. And what they do is they buy and set property and they actually automatically start getting dividends from it. And usually those are like clients that have like, you know, 200 K and above. They just want like a couple of thousand dollars every single month.

on their capital. And then we have other people that have smaller amounts, they have like 50,000 or 100,000, they just want to aggressively grow it. And they don’t really want just a small return, they don’t want an eight prep, they want like, oh, I want to get to 20, 30%.

And so we actually put their funds into, I would say, into new developments that we do new builds, new home construction. So they don’t get paid out monthly, but they do get paid out once the property sells as well. And then the other one is it’s another blindfold fund, but it’s also a flywheel. So basically they’re in everything, but we also get into like cryptocurrency. So we get into like Bitcoin over time, slowly allocate some of their capital to that. And it’s all in our account. So they can actually see their whole account balance.

And just over time, it just becomes, that’s what I do. I actually got into like buying my first property from getting into like Bitcoin back in like 2017. So I bought my first house like that.

back then. So from there, just kept on doing everything. And I’m still, you know, in those types of assets. But they’re definitely, they’ve been resilient for the past 15 years. I would say cryptocurrency is well, at least specifically Bitcoin, I would say has been resilient for the past 15 years. You know, it’s been progressively growing, you know, exponentially every year for over, you know, over the past decade, right. And so we offer that to offer slight exposure, not a huge amount.

to our clients that don’t have experience with that, but they’re able to invest and have slight exposure with it, whilst still having the security of real estate to back them up.

Kristen Knapp (17:45)
Right. Can you kind of explain how that flywheel works and the different steps with it?

Josh Brown (17:49)
Yeah. So ultimately we don’t. So, ultimately the way it works is it starts off with buying like a value added multifamily property.

⁓ So basically if we buy an Aplex, 20plex or 15 or 100 unit, whatever size of property is, it’s from the very beginning, hey, are we going to do the flyway with this? So everyone that buys into it, basically we go in and do the value add. We are get the appreciation on their capital. And basically when we do a refinance with those proceeds, we actually allocate about half of that to either Bitcoin or to gold. And at that point we just let it sit there and eventually we leverage that again.

we kind of pull against that value to start the whole process again. And at the same time, they’re getting paid off from the multifamily income. And at same time, they’re gaining appreciation on the cryptocurrency. And then just starting the whole process again.

Kristen Knapp (18:35)
Nice, yeah, so it’s kind of…

Yeah, that’s a way to really build some wealth.

Josh Brown (18:39)
Yeah, it’s exponentially been a huge blessing in doing it that way, for sure.

Kristen Knapp (18:44)
Do you get people who are kind of fearful of cryptocurrency?

Josh Brown (18:47)
Yes, 100%. Yeah, people, like, no, it’s still too new. And honestly, it is still new. is 100%. It is still new.

My thing is, hey, even now, more than ever, like if the government’s endorsing it, if the government’s literally having their own strategic Bitcoin reserve, they’re the ones that are saying themselves that this is digital gold. It’s even on the white, it’s like on the White House, it says this is digital gold. That means something, you know, if the government’s endorsing it, it has to mean something. But I’ve been in it since I think 2016, 2017 is when I first got into it. And so I’ve had a few years with it, but just seeing the growth of it over the past, like I said, past 10 years.

Kristen Knapp (19:10)
Mm-hmm.

Josh Brown (19:20)
You can’t deny it. It’s been the best performing asset over the past over that time, you know, so Once you show people those numbers and they get the once they get it like hey like your one reason real estate goes up the only reason stocks goes up is Because we we keep on printing money

And that’s why everything just inflates and inflates and inflates. like you can’t, if you leave your money in the bank, you already know you’re going to lose money. it’s going to go, your buying powers and go down. And so we emphasize like, Hey, like Bitcoin’s one of those things you can do Bitcoin and real estate are the ways that I see. And also the stock market, right? Are the ways that you can at least hold your capital.

Keep on growing that it’s still actually that you’re still able to use it in the future You know not not let it depreciate because if you just have it in the same account and you’re getting 2 % or 3 % or CD You’re literally not making anything. You’re you’re right at inflation If that well actually inflation is even higher, you know, they say all inflation is only at 3 or 4 percent But honestly, I think it’s like way way higher than that when you actually like go to restaurants you see like

Kristen Knapp (20:12)
Yeah.

Josh Brown (20:21)
I’ve seen it where everything’s almost doubled in the past three or four years. Even fast food or other restaurants, even the grocery stores, everything’s just more expensive. This is the reality of it.

Kristen Knapp (20:32)
Yeah, absolutely. think it’s a really, I mean, smart option to offer people. And I think that you guys cover a lot of different ways to invest your money.

Josh Brown (20:37)
Yeah.

100 % yeah, and it’s not for everyone right like this It’s a certain amount of people that do the flywheel entirely some people just do they just want Exposure to real estate and we’re all for that like that’s what we do too. You know we do everything so We’re it’s all just based on your risk tolerance really so

Kristen Knapp (20:58)
Right,

right, I love that. It’s really catering to the people and what they want and what they’re comfortable with. ⁓ So this has been, mean, what you’ve built is so impressive. What’s maybe a lesson you’ve learned along the way or a mistake you’ve made that you could share with us, that you’ve learned from?

Josh Brown (21:04)
100%.

I would say definitely there’s some growing pains from growing too fast. So we’ve had where we’ve faced, where we’ve hired the wrong people or we’ve built the wrong systems up front and having to redo everything over and over. just, if I were, I would probably would hire a mentor sooner that’s already been through.

that’s been through the trials that already knows that’s already been through what you’ve been what you’re going through and avoid all the mistakes because if you can if you can avoid the mistakes I would pay that premium and pay it to that mentor have them guide you a little bit on what is going to do before instead of you trying to figure out yourself making the most obvious mistakes I would say and then also being

conservative with acquisitions, there was at one point when we first started, now we’re good, right? But I remember we were buying every single property that we thought was a good deal. And that’s one way to definitely to get, I would say cash pour and asset rich, where you just keep on buying your property and all your money’s going out, you’re paying all those contractors and nothing has sold yet. So.

being really strategic with your acquisitions, how you’re managing your assets, and making sure you don’t end up with all your money out of the bank and you just don’t own all these houses. So we were really close at one point where we had like, I think it was like 15 different houses, 15 different projects, and all our money was just going out. And like, damn, we didn’t need to this out. We bought too many too fast. And luckily, like we did good. Like we sold everything, got out of them.

But that was like, there was a good, like solid six months where like, I felt like I was broke because all my money was out and my partner’s money was out. And we’re like, dude, we need to like save our money. I feel like I have no money right now for all these projects. So we knew in time that we were going to get it back. But yeah, just being wise with how you do your acquisitions. Don’t go all in on, there’s that saying from what’s his face that I think is, I think it’s Brandon. I think it’s Brandon Turner. He was like, you can, you can go broke chasing really good deals.

Kristen Knapp (22:49)
Yeah.

Josh Brown (23:11)
And that’s very, very true. Yeah.

Kristen Knapp (23:11)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that’s great advice. That’s really good information. So where can people find you?

Josh Brown (23:18)
Yeah, they can follow with you accounts. I know angels not hasn’t been on this podcast, but I think we should probably do one with them later on. But you can reach me at I’m on Instagram. So the dot Joshua Brown and then angels angel dot invests. And then our Instagram for capital advisors is capital dot advisors. That’s it. And then just our websites capital visors tx.com

Kristen Knapp (23:39)
Amazing! Well everyone, please check that out and thank you so much Josh for being here today.

Josh Brown (23:43)
Yeah, thank you so much, Kristen.

Kristen Knapp (23:44)
Awesome. Well, thank you everyone for listening and we’ll see you next time. Bye.

Josh Brown (23:48)
Thanks.