From Frustration to Fortune: Brad Chandler’s Real Estate Journey

John Harcar (00:01.666)
All right, hey guys, welcome back to our show. I’m your host, John Harcar, and I’m here today with Brad Chandler. And what we’re gonna talk about with Brad, I mean, besides his journey in business and real estate, we’re gonna talk about how in his investing business, I mean, he’s just finding too many deals, right? So he’s gonna talk about some of the ways that he’s able to be able to do that. I know some of us might have a struggle getting deals, so hopefully this will help.

Remember, guys, at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, really all real estate entrepreneurs, 2 5X their business. It’s by providing the tools, the resources, and the community to scale your business, which in turn helps you live the life that you’ve always wanted to live. Brad, welcome to our show.

Brad Chandler (00:46.813)
Hey, thank you. Good morning.

John Harcar (00:48.902)
I’m very interested in finding out how you’re turning, or get so many deals to turn them down. It’s never a bad problem to have. But before we talk about all that, why don’t you tell our audience a little bit about, you, kind of your background in business and real estate and kind of what brought you to today.

Brad Chandler (01:05.493)
So I first got into real estate when I was looking for an investment property and I got irritated with realtors because they wouldn’t let me in. It was a pain to get a hold of them. So I thought to myself, how hard can this be? just go get my license. the original intention was to just let myself into houses and have access to the MLS. That was…

John Harcar (01:30.551)
Okay.

Brad Chandler (01:35.035)
nine years ago and now I ended up leaving my other job and I have a real estate team with five agents on it that I’m running all because realtors pissed me off and I wanted to be able to get into houses and have access to the MLS. And then what’s kind of, I mean I got into it because I wanted to do investing and then I was doing like a house or two a year.

And then I met a client as a realtor who was a contractor, because originally I did all the work myself, and now I don’t do any of myself. So then we, I met my business partner on this, and I found a house that was a great deal, but it was so much work. I was like, I can’t tackle this by myself. So I called a client and said, hey,

I’ll split this with you like this is just too much for me or it’s it’s it’s a great deal I’m gonna buy it one way or another but if you want to split it it went great and he said how many of these do you find I said I don’t know I do a couple a year You know just kind of I just kind of bump into him being a realtor I don’t look that hard and he goes well we should look and see how many we can find and that was in 22 and last year

John Harcar (02:43.308)
Bye.

Brad Chandler (02:52.467)
I think we bought 14 houses last year. And we keep some and we sell some and we kind of do it that way. But yeah, I ended up as a realtor because I don’t like realtors. And then it ended up actually really growing my investment stuff where it’s kind of neat because now I create a lot of my own inventory. It kind of creates an ecosystem that they feed off of each other.

John Harcar (03:15.544)
Mm-hmm.

Were you taking properties that came to you that want to list where you took kind of buying, taking those down and flipping those? Is that kind of what your model was or maybe holding them for a rental?

Brad Chandler (03:27.157)
Well, that’s how it started was like, I’d be showing something like I’d be showing someone a house and they’d be like, Hey, my dad passed away. I got this house. Like nobody’s going to want it. It’s full of junk. It’s falling down. And I’d just say, Hey, I’ll, you know, I’ll give you whatever for it. And I was finding, like I said, a couple, a couple of years that way. And it was kind of, you know, a nice little side side project.

But then, like I said, it’s morphed and evolved into its own thing where we’re actually bought even a chunk of land last year that we’re going to develop into nine duplexes.

John Harcar (03:54.754)
Yeah.

John Harcar (04:01.774)
Okay, what were you know, you mentioned, you know, you got into this when you were looking to buy an investment property What were you doing at that point? Were you in real estate? I mean what what was you?

Brad Chandler (04:10.645)
No, used to write radio for 11 years. I wrote radio commercials and I sold radio commercials and so I had nothing to do with anything. I I had framed houses and built houses before I got into radio and was like, you know,

John Harcar (04:16.129)
cool.

Brad Chandler (04:27.197)
I’d like to start picking up a rental, fixing it, just kind of a, it was meant to be a side hustle and getting my real estate license was meant just so I could access the MLS easier. But then a friend would call back, can you sell my house? I’m like, I guess I could, I’m not really, know. But real estate started growing so much that it, then I ended up just switching to just being a realtor.

John Harcar (04:43.758)
Yeah.

John Harcar (04:51.502)
Well, I mean, that makes sense. were, you know, when you got into doing all that, I were there any struggles, any challenges you started off with, you know, maybe not.

Brad Chandler (04:59.155)
The biggest challenge is at the beginning and I don’t, you’re always running out of money, it’s the problem. And you’re always trying to, you know, the first projects I had, you know, a HELOC on my house.

John Harcar (05:09.752)
Right.

Brad Chandler (05:18.823)
I worked out a line of credit at a hardware store that I sold them their radio ads and was like, you know, hey, I’m out of money and I can’t finish this because I can’t afford the supplies because it ended up costing more than I thought. So I got them to give me a line of credit. You know, you’re trying to beg, borrow and steal every dollar you can get so that.

John Harcar (05:28.098)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (05:38.85)
Hey, Rob from Peter to PayPal, man. Get it done.

Brad Chandler (05:41.135)
Exactly. So you’re kind of just shuffling it around, paying off this and then reborrowing it. So I mean, that was always and then the struggle of the first few projects I did the work myself. Like that’s like having, you know, getting off work and then you’re going to hang doors and paint trim and frame in whatever. Like that’s a whole nother job.

John Harcar (05:58.904)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (06:02.934)
Right. Did you have any mentors or any coaches or anybody to help you along in the business or in the process or anything?

Brad Chandler (06:10.449)
In the beginning, no, it was just the school of hard knocks and feeling, figuring it out and kind of just beating your head against the wall till something useful happened and being like, I don’t, I know what’s not working this.

John Harcar (06:14.349)
Yeah.

John Harcar (06:22.998)
Yeah, you find out more of what’s not working before you find out what really works.

Brad Chandler (06:27.573)
You know now I have a coach that’s been really awesome. I got a coach Three or four years ago, and that’s made a big difference Having a business partner that’s a contractor has made a big difference too because now he has you know the

Even when I stopped doing my work myself and was hiring contractors, you’re still trying to track them down and you’re like, hey, we’re supposed to list this in three days. Like you’re not done. Where are you? I need you to come here and finish whatever it is. So now it’s been a lot easier because he has a vested interest getting done. He can tell his employees like, hey, we’re doing overtime this week. It’s getting listed Thursday. Make sure we’re done by Monday for pictures.

John Harcar (07:12.526)
Yeah.

Brad Chandler (07:14.325)
That’s made a huge difference. then as you grow, banks get more comfortable with you, loaning you money. We’ve got individual investors that just loan us money. It’s very interesting because as you grow, more people start, no one wants to help you at first and loan you anything. And then as you grow, all of sudden, I’ve had people just, I know, call me and be like, hey man, I got a couple hundred thousand dollars. Can I loan it to you?

John Harcar (07:34.892)
Yeah.

John Harcar (07:42.764)
Yep. Yeah, they want to see the proof in the pudding, man. They want to see that you’re doing it and everybody’s afraid to be that first guy that that’s in. You don’t want to be the first one that’s in and lose it. Well, that’s cool, man. I dig that story. So what does your business look like now? What you know, how many deals are you doing? What are you doing?

Brad Chandler (07:46.675)
Yeah.

Brad Chandler (07:51.529)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Brad Chandler (08:01.813)
So we do so our the real estate team sold 117 houses last year So, um, that’s going really good and then um, we we bought 14, right? I think so. I think it was 14. We bought last year. I think we’ve bought I can probably tell you I bought six This is my assistant. My assistant cassie is here too

John Harcar (08:07.81)
Nice.

John Harcar (08:22.702)
Is that your wife over there? assistant. have her jump in here. Come on. Hi, Cassie. How are you?

Brad Chandler (08:29.711)
answer any questions where I’m like, I think we bought six or seven this year. So, and like I said, is we bought our first chunk of land that we’re going to develop. We’ve never done new construction, so that’ll be a new, but you know, having the, having the, you know, so, and then we formed the Flipping Company to be its own company. But what’s been nice as a realtor is, you know, I’m creating a lot of my own inventory.

John Harcar (08:36.12)
Okay.

Brad Chandler (08:56.693)
I’m in that realm of the world already. So it’s really created an ecosystem around where the businesses all help each other do more. So.

John Harcar (09:06.2)
Sure. Yeah, I know. That’s where a lot of, you know, like a lot of guys in our mastermind are adding verticals in their business, which all help each other. They all compliment each other. Well, that’s awesome. So let’s talk about, you know, what you mentioned before, which is usually a statement you don’t hear from people. Like I have so many deals I don’t know what to do with. I mean, usually it’s like, man, I can’t get my hands on deals. So what’s the secret sauce, man?

Brad Chandler (09:12.351)
Mm.

Brad Chandler (09:30.943)
So we do a lot of things. have a, it’s a Facebook ad and it’s just me. I should have wore it today. I have these shirts that say, no house is too gross. Call for a cash offer. And then it’s got my phone number and my Instagram on the back. And it’s me standing in a house wearing one of those shirts being like, whether you inherit it, this or that, just call me. You know? Yeah. It’s like a hoarder house full of garbage. It’s disgusting. Yeah. Like.

John Harcar (09:43.758)
Okay.

John Harcar (09:57.482)
Yeah, the money houses. Yeah, the things you smell that smelled like money, but not really.

Brad Chandler (10:03.032)
Exactly. Well, that’s people don’t know what money smells like. It smells awful. So we run that. That gets us some. We my business partners, we can’t put a billboard where his where his location is, but he’s on a really busy street. So we made our own super ugly ghetto billboard and we put it on top of a car because we can park a car there and put a sign on top of a car. The city won’t allow billboards.

John Harcar (10:27.659)
Okay.

Brad Chandler (10:31.785)
that just says no house is too gross, call for a cash offer today. That’s it, we get them from there.

We do, I’ve got calls off just my, I wear my t-shirts a lot of days. I’m just happen to not be wearing one today. Which is funny because people like the number of times, like I was like, if I sell one house ever this way off these stupid shirts, it was the best thing I ever, you know, they cost 50 bucks. then the, what’s been interesting was I met, as we’ve met more and more of these wholesalers, we met one out of Spokane and he was like, Brad, I’m going to tell you Yakima is not very big.

John Harcar (10:45.87)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (10:54.242)
Heck yeah! Yeah.

Brad Chandler (11:09.139)
very quickly if you develop a reputation of closing on them they’ll just call you like you’re not going to have to look for them anymore and then what has been really new though that we’ve bought seven or eight houses probably is I send an email every month to all of the realtors in town

John Harcar (11:14.776)
Sure.

Brad Chandler (11:32.105)
that says have a listing you don’t want to deal with call me before you list it I’ll give you I’ll pay you up to 3 % every time that email goes out I get a phone call without fail we don’t always buy it sometimes they want too much but I thought of this a while ago like if I was finding one or two a year just in the course of doing my business they’re finding them too and they don’t want to deal with it you know

John Harcar (11:39.928)
Perfect.

John Harcar (11:47.618)
Yeah.

John Harcar (11:57.87)
Mm-hmm.

Brad Chandler (12:01.525)
We’re going to give you about the last one for $140, so what? They get $4,000 in 10 days off just calling me? It’s real worth their while to not… They don’t want to do pictures and list it.

John Harcar (12:10.655)
Eww.

John Harcar (12:16.03)
No, they all have properties that they want to get rid of with a little work. But the thing is, they’re worried about not getting paid when they talk to investors. Now you’re saying, hey, look, I’ll pay you 3%. That’s incredible.

Brad Chandler (12:27.763)
Yeah, and so that’s really taken off and I think, I mean, like I said, we kind of have a marketing mix to do it, but as we’ve developed our reputation, there’s several realtors that we’ve bought three or four from that keep calling and keep, or one of them I know works with a lawyer and her deal is I always call you first. Anything I get from the lawyer, I’ll call you first to see if you want to buy it without listing it before I list it.

So it’s, you know, we’re getting first dibs at stuff that nobody else gets to see. you know, by the time you see it, we’ve decided we don’t want it. And so it’s been, like I said, it’s gotten to the point where sometimes I’m like, you know, we’re usually have about five or six we’re working on at a time.

Right, to have to tell them, like, you know, and we’ve tried to wholesale them or get them to other people, you know, buy it and sell it to someone else without fixing it, but it’s kind of wild sometimes. Or we just offer lower, like, hey, it’s gotta be a better deal because we’re working on six houses right now. I don’t have, I don’t really need a seventh right now, but if it’s cheap enough, I’ll make it from, yeah.

John Harcar (13:21.217)
Right.

John Harcar (13:30.679)
Sure.

Is there anything specific preventing you guys from scaling up to do more?

Brad Chandler (13:39.029)
business partner’s up to 40 employees now. We have guys, he’s got guys that only work on our projects. you know, upscaling the way we’ll get more is we’ll just tell people like I can pay you that, but you got to carry the contract to me on good terms. We’ll take.

John Harcar (13:44.546)
Jeez.

John Harcar (13:57.004)
Yeah, seller finance, so owner carry, stuff like that.

Brad Chandler (14:00.117)
Yeah, so that’s been, because we run out of, mean, just like in the beginning when you run out of money, we still run out of money and go, you know, hey, the timing’s not, you know, we’re selling this one, we’re refinancing this one, but if you’ll carry the contract to us, you know, we can pay you in three months. So that’s kind of, and we’ve done actually more more owner financing of it, but you know, what’s been interesting has been too, the more, the more we do,

Most of money we borrow comes from just people we know. You know, and like, so it’s been interesting to find out there’s a lot of people that have a lot more money than you think they do. And they’re looking for somewhere to put it. And you know, like one of our investors, she, we closed on a deal and

John Harcar (14:44.078)
yes.

Brad Chandler (14:55.199)
We had the next one lined up and she goes, well, I’m just gonna leave my money at the title company. Like, I don’t wanna have to go pick it up and wire transfer it just to put it back in a week. I’ll just leave it there. And we had another guy that was like, when we paid him back, he’s like, okay, well let me know like, when do you need it again? Like, he said, this is just earmarked to loan to you. go find something else. So it’s been neat that some of them just have it just marked like, hey, this is yours whenever you need to borrow it. Just keep borrowing it.

John Harcar (15:23.66)
Yeah, if you perform, why not? You’re making a money.

Brad Chandler (15:24.745)
But you know, one of them made like, I think just shy of $50,000 last year and he’s got a whole nother job that he does. You know, this was just a side project for him to just, you know, and he’s, you know, he’s the lean holder on the property. So it’s not like if anything goes wrong, you know, he’s very well protected, you know, or buy him for cheap enough. and, and yeah, but so it’s been interesting to see.

John Harcar (15:33.72)
Yeah.

John Harcar (15:46.936)
Sure.

Brad Chandler (15:52.583)
I don’t know, I didn’t realize how much money was out there and how much some people might surprise you with what they have.

John Harcar (15:59.606)
You just got to be out there and ask. You to be proactive about it. So is there anything big right now you’re working on? Anything that you may be looking for investors on that you can kind of share with our audience?

Brad Chandler (16:02.089)
Yeah.

Brad Chandler (16:11.315)
We’re we always we always we never not need more money. That’s a never and like I said as it’s As it’s grown we’ve yeah like just we just always perpetually we’re trying to find someone to fund us to do that or like Yesterday we wrote offers on two of them and I told my business partners like you know if these both get it if they take both of them I don’t only know how we’re gonna pay for one of them

John Harcar (16:29.389)
Yeah.

John Harcar (16:39.096)
Right.

Brad Chandler (16:39.475)
And he’s like, yeah, I know, we’ll figure it out. And I was like, okay, I just.

John Harcar (16:41.742)
Like, that’s not a bad problem to have, right? It’s better to…

Brad Chandler (16:45.467)
No, it’s not. actually one of them didn’t get taken. found out this morning. So they thought we were too low, but it’s been, yeah, it’s been, but yeah, no, our scaling is just scale faster and getting into new constructions, our big project. It’ll be interesting this year. I mean, I mean, it’s July. It’s the 1st of July. So probably we’ll start building them next year, but, it’s been a

John Harcar (16:50.126)
There you go.

John Harcar (17:03.533)
Nice.

John Harcar (17:10.328)
Hmm.

Brad Chandler (17:13.373)
Yeah, it really was like the wholesaler out of Spokane. He’s been doing this a long time. He’s like, you just get a reputation and it’s been interesting because too, some of the realtors that call me are very high level, do a good job and you’re like, really? don’t, you know, why aren’t you buying it? I know you could buy it. They just don’t, you know, let’s get our 45 hundred bucks in 10 days and move on.

John Harcar (17:31.446)
Yeah, yeah.

John Harcar (17:38.446)
turn and burn that are quality or quantity over quality sometimes.

Brad Chandler (17:42.277)
And I think some of them don’t want to have the reputation of their listings of like, hey, this is a garbage listing. Like, you know, they want to have status up here or they’re a little bougie and don’t want to deal with, you know, the nastiness that comes with the I mean, they all smell like death usually and are shoulder deep in garbage and

John Harcar (17:52.206)
Yeah, I’m gonna add that too.

John Harcar (18:03.907)
Yep.

John Harcar (18:07.656)
And that’s money to me. Brad, if there’s folks on here that are listening to this and maybe they’re in the Washington area or they just read something you said resonated with them, how is the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Brad Chandler (18:09.877)
Okay.

Brad Chandler (18:21.653)
Our Instagram is at the letter W Brad Chandler and actually I post videos about all our projects there So someone wanted to see what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. They can see it at W Brad Chandler on Instagram Our website is W Brad Chandler dot com and you could call me. It’s 509-312-0921 So

John Harcar (18:28.824)
Cool.

John Harcar (18:44.408)
Sweet. Cool. And I’ll put all that information in the show notes. Thank you for coming on here and sharing all that info, man. And guys, you at home, I hope you took good notes and learned a little bit. I know I did. And Brad, thank you again. And we’ll see you guys on the next one. Cheers.

Brad Chandler (18:48.874)
Good.

Brad Chandler (18:59.583)
Thank you. All right, have a one.