From YouTube Followers to Real Estate Deals: Robert Crager’s Community Funnel

Robert Crager (00:00)
So I went for three and a half or four years of just doing the YouTube thing, shelling out the money, hiring editors and all of that stuff. It was an investment that wasn’t getting much of a return. When we started to build the community, that’s where the the real secret sauce.

Is, right? So that’s where we’ve now done dozens and dozens. I would actually say the last couple dozen deals I’ve done have come directly from a community. So I’m no longer having to call sellers most of the time. I’m I’m not having to do any outreach.

Dylan Silver (02:01)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today we’re joined by returning guest Robert Crager, known as the Flip Flop Flipper. He’s an investor operating across Florida and Puerto Rico with nearly 30 years of experience and more than 3,000 completed transactions. He’s also the leader of a Skool community with over forty eight hundred members. Robert, thanks for taking the time here today.

Robert Crager (02:23)
Thanks, Dylan man. I’m glad to be back. Appreciate this.

Dylan Silver (02:26)
Now there’s many folks who are interested in building communities and digital communities. You’ve actually done it. What does the foundation look like? What does getting started building a digital community look like?

Robert Crager (02:40)
Yeah, that this is a a a great question. And and this is where I see things going for everyone. If you’re starting out in in any business really, to have a social media presence and then to build community is I mean, for me, having done this for nearly 30 years, be in the real estate business, nothing has ever been more powerful than having a community. So it it started almost five years ago in earnest on YouTube, just putting out some videos where I was showing some people who had invested with me, they were in the States and I was in Puerto Rico and I and I was just doing bad videos, handheld stuff, showing my showing my guys, hey, this is the house that we own together. And it’s become a lot more than that. So the top of the funnel, if you will, becomes the YouTube channel. And and we’re about to hit a hundred thousand subscribers on the YouTube channel, the Flip Flop Flipper YouTube channel. We’ve put out thousands of videos as well.

And we just basically, we talked about this before we went on air. We give the secret sauce. We we tell people exactly what we do, how we do it, we talk about why we do the things that we do. And you can see in real time decisions that we’re making through, you know, watching us on the on that channel. And then that funnels through to if you want to become a real estate investor, then we’ve got a free community for you where you can come and be in a room online with other people who are thinking the same thoughts, right?

And so you’re actually can join a community. It’s an easy step. It costs nothing. All you got to do is put a comment in one of my videos saying, Hey, give me that link. And I personally hand out those links. And and now, like you said, on Skool, that’s the platform that that we’re on. We do some education stuff there, but mostly it’s networking, it’s you know, people posting deals, people meeting each other, partnerships are forming.

And and that free community then leads to a paid community where people are more serious and and you start to see actual deal volume happening. And and then ultimately that leads to people who really wanna be in the game with us, who wanna be kind of partnered up, become a part of our mastermind group. So it it’s several levels to it, starts with YouTube funnel, funnel, funnel, and then ultimately

You know, if they if they join our our high ticket mastermind, they’ve got me on speed dial and we’re we’re actively doing deals together and and we’re building businesses together. And I I’ve never seen anything more powerful than the community-based business. Because let’s face it, if you are a person who’s thinking about doing anything and you have these desires, let’s take real estate for instance, but everyone you know is a plumber because you’re a plumber and you go find a great deal and bring your deal to your group of plumbers.

Maybe you’re gonna be able to put the money together. Maybe it’s gonna happen, but likely the plumbers are gonna say, Hey, fix that pipe. Let’s just move on. That’s cute that you went and found a deal. But if you bring that same deal to a group of people who want to be real estate investors, the vast majority of the time, especially if you have a great deal, you’re gonna find the funding. You’re gonna find your business partner, you’re gonna find somebody who can partner up with you in whatever manner you want. And that’s the kind of community that we’ve built. We’ve

We’ve built a community where people are bringing deals, where people are are taking those deals and running with them from A to Z. And then we’ve also got people like me who are in the community where like, let’s back the great operators. Let’s let’s back the people who are finding these deal of a lifetime type scenarios, and we’ll write a check, let someone else do all of the work, and then we get a bigger check back. So people the the leverage that you can find inside of a community, an online community or an in-person community or a combination.

I’ve never seen anything more powerful, Dylan. It’s just incredible. And so I I’m I’m passionate about it. Like this is how we’re finding all of our new opportunities. We’re, we’re we’re simply going to do deals with people inside of our community. And we’ve we’ve over the years, I say all the time, I’ve helped thousands of people become homeowners. And now I’m going to help thousands of people become real estate investors. And I couldn’t do it if we weren’t, you know, building a community and weren’t very intentional about it.

Dylan Silver (07:27)
It’s challenging refining a funnel. You’ve obviously done a tremendous job of it between the YouTube, the Skool community, the mastermind group, right? How has that funnel and and that process morphed over time?

Robert Crager (07:42)
Man. So again, I told you I started the YouTube channel just to kind of put the word out to people I was in business with. And it sort of took on a life of its own. And I I got three and a half years into the YouTube, you know, putting out a lot of videos, a lot of content. There was no monetization of it. And then my son, McKenna, kind of called me up one day and he says, Hey Dad, you’re you know, you’ve got thirty thousand people watching you regularly on YouTube.

Or 20,000 or whatever it was at the time, he says, I think you should be monetized at this point. And I’ve been looking at this thing called Skool. I think that, you know, we could invite people to a free community and then and eventually we’ll we’ll make some money with this thing.

So I went for three and a half or four years of just doing the YouTube thing, shelling out the money, hiring editors and all of that stuff. It was an investment that wasn’t getting much of a return. When we started to build the community, that’s where the the real secret sauce.

Is, right? So that’s where we’ve now done dozens and dozens. I I would actually say the last couple dozen deals I’ve done have come directly from a community. So I’m no longer having to call sellers most of the time. I’m I’m not having to do any outreach.

I I’m showing others how to do everything that we’ve done. And then I get to be involved with the ones that people invite me into that that look good. It’s evolved from from something that

That wasn’t even an idea into what I’m passionate about and where I see the business going over the next 10 or 15 years. Like I think our community will cut some kind of X multiple. Like we’re like you said, in our free community right now, we’re approaching 5,000 members. I think over the next 10 years that that could be 500,000 members. And and everything will grow because of that. And and my goal is to see more people own houses.

And really to see more people become entrepreneurs and real estate investors. And so through this community, that’s that’s what we hope to achieve.

Dylan Silver (09:40)
Now are you and McKenna looking regularly at the the organization of the funnel and how to improve certain things? This can be very intricate and there can like bottlenecks with an a funnel. How much into the weeds do you get into then?

Robert Crager (09:54)
I get I get more into the weeds than I’d than I’d like to admit, but we we we work on it every single day. We’ve also we’ve also spent an an incredible amount of money to learn how to do what we’re doing. So it’s not it you you can’t have the kind of growth that we’ve had if someone didn’t show us how to do it, which is why I don’t mind showing other people how to do it, because nobody ever does anything great without somebody showing them how to do it. So we’re we’re a member of multiple mastermind groups.

And we’ve we’ve gotten coaching on how to grow the funnel, how to run the community. And we’re always trying to improve. There’s nothing that we do that our team does where we’re not actively thinking about how do we do it better next time. And so we’re we’re we’re just we’re kind of nerds about it, right? Everything we do is to how to make it better, how to how to have a better experience for anybody who wants to figure out if they want to be a real estate investor.

We’re we’re trying to give them the best experience they can get.

Dylan Silver (11:28)
Now one of the challenging things about building communities, like you mentioned, is there’s a a component of you you can be a great networker, right? And you can have a great r referral network even and folks that associate with your brand. But then tying in the tech component is is challenging. Skool does a great job of it. When you were identifying, well, where are we gonna host

the community and then how is this gonna integrate with our YouTube channel? Was it an obvious, you know, hey, we’re gonna go with Skool, were there other communities or hosting platforms that you were considering at the time?

Robert Crager (12:01)
Man, there’s a there’s dozens of other communities and they’re great. Other other or other places you can host communities. I mean, Facebook does a good job of it and and I’ve seen people have tons of success with it. I like this guy, Alex Hormozi. We call him the muscle man inside of our our team. And he he was just out there talking about Skool at the time that we were looking for somewhere to go, and so he was the natural place for us to go. I actually watch him on YouTube and so I trust him, and so I went where he said to go.

Which I think is why it’s so powerful, right? Is because someone can see you and I talking and they they connect with you, Dylan, or they connect with me and they go, I want to see more from that guy. And then and now information is so easy. I have thousands of videos out there. You have thousands of podcasts out there. Someone can go down the Dylan rabbit hole or the Robbie Crager Flip Flop Flipper rabbit hole on their cell phone and then they can end up in a community with us and then they could end up buying a house with us or they could end up in a mastermind. It it’s

It’s amazing how powerful it is.

Dylan Silver (13:00)
Do you have any pivoting here, Robbie, do you have any specific deals that you like to see coming across your desk these days? Any specific asset classes that you’re looking at regularly?

Robert Crager (13:10)
Well, I’ve made I I’ve made my money in housing. So I’m I’m I’m very housing centric, but I’m sort of if it’s a good deal, I’ll buy it. But o of the thousands of deals that we’ve done, the vast, vast majority of them have been single family housing, maybe small multifamily up to medium size apartment complexes. I like the medium size apartment complexes a little bit more now as I’ve I’ve gotten

A little bit older and I’m more I’m more interested in the monthly recurring revenue. So I I when I was younger, I was just all about buy it, sell it, buy it, sell it. And I did that. That’s how you get to have done thousands of deals is you you buy and sell things as fast as you can. Now I like to buy and hold. So we’ve shifted a little bit, but I still have 10 or 15 flips going at any time. And we’ve usually got an apartment complex that we’re looking at buying or and I’m and I’m not talking about a big apartment, but like we’re buying a 50-unit apartment complex right now in Puerto Rico.

Last year we bought a fourteen unit in Connecticut. So those kind of those kind of properties are easy for us to manage and and it’s been a stretch over the last couple of years. Like they’re bigger than what we were doing five years ago, but they’re not Grant Cardone big, if you will.

Dylan Silver (14:23)
Now, if you’re looking at these deals, you know, there’s a lot of talk about, you know, workforce housing and affordable housing, and you know, there has to be room to force appreciate these deals, and there me competition in these like A or A minus communities with a pool and two gyms and so forth. Do you tend to stick around any one grade, if you will, of multifamily?

Robert Crager (14:44)
I’ve I’ve been all over the place, but what I what I always get pulled back to is serving the people that are most like the people I grew up with. So we we grew up I grew up in a modest household. We weren’t poor. We we were kind of lower middle class, you know. My dad had a corporate job. Those are the people I don’t know if it’s quite workforce housing, but we do do a lot of Section 8, which is probably workforce type housing. The 50 the 52 unit that we’re buying right now is something called the HAP program.

Which is a a government assisted housing program. So we we do end up doing a lot of that type of of product because those are the people that I grew up with and and they’re the ones that I that I prefer to serve. I have not ventured into that A plus stuff that you’re talking about that I I’ll go back to the Grant Cardone. You know, like where I’m at in Hollywood, Florida here, there are units, three or four hundred unit buildings that are

50, 60, 80, 100 million dollars to purchase them. And and you go there and and you have a live, live work play where you can go to the gym down here and the spa here, and your your office could be in the same building. I’m I’m just providing housing to regular people, regular folks, and and that’s what we’ve done throughout the years. Not that I wouldn’t love to invest in something like that. That that that might be the next stretch that we get to, but I s I do just seem to always kind of end up

E either buying and fixing and selling homes in that kind of bottom part of the market, I I would call it entry level, you know, like first time homebuyer type market is is what we have throughout the last twenty nine, thirty years. I don’t even want to say we focused on it’s just what we did. You know, I don’t know if it was a a conscious decision. My money goes further when I buy the lower end part of it and I and I make nice returns and I and I serve a population that I care about.

Dylan Silver (17:12)
Now, when we look at Florida as a whole, I’ve said this on other podcasts, there seems to be like many versions of Florida. You’ve got like country Florida, which is like Jacksonville, Daytona, you’ve got South Florida, you’ve got the West Coast of Florida, you’ve got the the panhandle right. When folks are looking at deals across Florida, would you recommend them picking a niche and specializing there? Or can you c like you mentioned earlier, be market agnostic even as you’re in your growth phase?

Robert Crager (17:40)
Yeah. So I think it’s never been easier to move and buy real estate outside of your own backyard. I and I and I come from an area or or a time in life where everybody had a farm area, which was basically where you could get to in a day, right? Like that was generally what everybody, Ron LeGrand and and Carlton Sheets, everybody would say, Hey, just go drive your neighborhood and look at those houses. And that’s exactly what I did, and it works.

But now with technology and with community based organizations like like you have, like we have, you can do it anywhere you want. And you can do it literally from your home on on a computer, you know, surfing the internet and and finding deals. So I I’m torn because I like to have proximity to where I’m investing and I generally invest where I am.

So I moved to the island of Puerto Rico and now I’ve done hundreds of deals on the island of Puerto Rico. If I leave the island of Puerto Rico and move to the Dominican Republic, it’s very likely I’m gonna do hundreds of deals in the Dominican Republic, right? Wherever I am, that’s where I’m going to invest my money. But you don’t have to do that now. I came from a time where it was much more difficult to invest, say, in in Indianapolis, Indiana from Orlando, Florida. Now I think that happens every day. I think that’s

Pretty easy. You can you can just kind of cherry pick great deals all over the country and it’s perfectly it’s perfectly doable and fine. So I’m a little bit torn on that. I hope I’m not talking on both sides of the coin there too much.

Dylan Silver (19:06)
No, yeah, it there’s a lot of folks who, you know, are able to do it remotely, but it’s challenging, right? It’s challenging on so many levels because you don’t know that market as well as you know your backyard. You might not have the the contractors or the property managers in place. And so when you need someone, you know, in a bind, that could be challenging as well. And then just simply not being in the area, right? If things change, if there’s local policies that are changing and you’re not abreast to it, you can kind of get taken by

Surprise. All of that becomes challenging unless you’ve got really good boots on the ground. We are coming up on time here though. Any new projects or activities that you’re working on? And then also anything you’d like to mention directly to our audience.

Robert Crager (19:48)
Cool. All right. You know, we’re gonna continue to do this community-based business where where we’re gonna build the community, we’re gonna invite people to to join us. And if you if you care about real estate, we’re value add real estate investors, so we like to buy the dirty stuff and fix them up and get something that was the ugliest place on the street and turn it into the most beautiful. That’s the kind of real estate we like to invest in. If that’s interesting to you, we’ve got a a boot camp coming up. It’s a it’s a virtual boot camp called Get in the Game.

On September third. And if you don’t mind, Dylan, I I can share a link for you to put out with this video if you if you can get it out before then. I can I can even give you a referral code. I’d love for your audience to come and join us and check it out. Basically, what we teach is there’s three ways to make money in real estate. There’s always a finder or wholesaler, somebody somebody who goes and finds a great deal. There’s always an operator, somebody who takes it from A to Z and makes sure that everybody involved makes money, and there’s always a funder. And that could be all three people.

But very often it’s one for each of those roles. But i in every deal, regardless, those are the three roles. You have to find a great deal, you have to fix it, and then you have to pay for it. And so we teach that and and we show people, you know, what are they most cut out to be right now with their current skill set. So if you’re thinking about becoming a real estate investor, it’s a great next step.

Dylan Silver (21:04)
Robbie, thanks so much for your time today. Thanks for joining us.

Robert Crager (21:06)
Thanks for having me, man. I hope that hits hard for your audience. You guys follow me on YouTube too, the Flip Flop Flipper. We’re about to hit a hundred thousand subscribers. We’d love to have you watching our videos.