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Show Summary
In this episode of the Real Estate Pros Podcast, host Micah Johnson interviews Noble Crawford, a successful real estate investor specializing in government contracts for lodging and accommodations. Noble shares his journey from technology sales to real estate, detailing how personal challenges led him to pursue entrepreneurship. He explains the intricacies of working with federal agencies, the profitability of government contracts, and the importance of mentorship in the industry. Listeners gain insights into the unique niche of government contracting in real estate and the strategies for success in this field.
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Noble Crawford (00:00)
Now here’s the deal. OK, this is where it gets good. The GSA rate at that time was 167 a night. OK? So if you do the math, 167 a night times 30 nights for the one bedrooms that the airline pilots were in, or the helicopter pilots, is 5,000.It’s like $5,010 a month. Okay. So we’re grossing $5,010 a month on a one bedroom apartment. We don’t own it. We’re just leasing it. We’re controlling it. The property management knows what we’re doing. They’re good with it, right? Because it’s not Airbnb. These are federal personnel coming in,
Micah Johnson (00:32)
Right?Hey everyone. Welcome to the real estate pros podcast. I’m your host, Micah Johnson. And today I’m joined by Noble Crawford has been making some serious moves in real estate investing for about eight years now. Noble welcome in man. Glad to have you.
Noble Crawford (02:19)
Hey, I appreciate you having me.Micah Johnson (02:21)
Absolutely, man. I’m excited for you to be here. I got jazzed up in our pre-recording talk. You do some pretty cool stuff. I think our listeners are really going to take something away from learning about, heck man, a niche I didn’t even know existed for today’s podcast. So let’s dig in there. For those who are listening who may not know you yet, what’s your main focus right now and what markets do you operate in?Noble Crawford (02:45)
Yes, sir. So my main focus right now is in the ⁓ lodging and accommodation space, but more specifically, providing ⁓ lodging and accommodations and housing to different federal agencies. So it’s not section eight, because that’s the number one question I get, right? But we provide the inventory to different various federal agencies.Micah Johnson (03:02)
Right.Interesting. Okay, I gotta back you up. How in the world did you end up there?
Noble Crawford (03:11)
Yeah, so the long story is ⁓ I was introduced to this ⁓ industry that most of us are already familiar with, which is the short-term rental space, or Airbnb, I was introduced to that back in 2017, but prior to that, I worked in technology, and I was selling technology ⁓ into different verticals, right? One of the verticals that I sold into was the federal government, right, military and federal government, okay?And so that was during my W2 days, right? And so I was, you know, I was a commercial sales technology person, right? ⁓ So long story short, wife, she gets sick. She gets sick and we take her to the doctor. She’d been having this recurring headaches and they were like, you got a brain tumor and it’s sizable. We need to get it out like yesterday. Okay. So we scheduled a surgery, so on and so forth, get her in what should have been a six to eight hour surgery takes 14 hours. Okay. And so she made it, makes it through the surgery second day in the ICU.
Micah Johnson (03:56)
⁓Noble Crawford (04:10)
But she flatlines, not once, but twice, right? Turns out she was allergic to morphine and they had on a morphine drip post-surgery and it was killing her organs from the inside out, right? And so they were able to resuscitate her and everything and she’s still with us here today. But on the heels of that, that moment, I had a decision to make to either go back to my W-2 and grind it out, you know, and I was commissioned sales at that time, or I could stay home and take care of my wife because herMicah Johnson (04:25)
And glad to here.Noble Crawford (04:37)
recovery was extensive, right? And so I elected to stay home and take care of her. So at the end of that period, 46 weeks later, I got called back into the office for a company-wide sales meeting. And in that meeting, the CEO of the company at that time berated me in front of everybody for my dismal sales numbers for the previous month. Nevermind the fact that everyone knew what I was going through with my wife and at home taking care of my wife, right? So I had made a decision in that moment that I’m not going to be subject to somebody else’s time and so on and so forth. And I was going toput my head down and grind and work myself up out of that job, which I did. I landed a couple of large projects, took my commission and rolled out. And on the heels of that, started a marketing agency. And I learned this concept monthly recurring revenue, MRR. And I fell in love with that. started scaling. I was like, I can get used to this. Only problem was I was working more hours as an entrepreneur than I was when I was W2. It kind of defeated the purpose, right? And so my dad, ironically enough,
Micah Johnson (05:22)
Right.Right.
Noble Crawford (05:35)
Introduced to me to this YouTube video and it was about this guy doing short-term rentals He was like a short-term rents I said, don’t know so the guy put on this mastermind out in California me and my wife flew out there and we said hey We can do this back at home. We came back put our heads down went to work and the rest is history So that’s how I got startedMicah Johnson (06:40)
Man, that’s beautiful. And that’s the freedom I love real estate really provides folks is when you find your niche in it, what you like to do in it, it lines up that emotional paycheck with that financial paycheck and boom, can just sky becomes the limit. So, all right, you have past history selling to the government before you get into short term rentals. How long before you started working with government contracts again? What led to them becoming a primary customer?Noble Crawford (07:08)
Great question. So I’m in like year two of doing what we started out doing initially Airbnb, right? So I mean, year two, we started scaling our portfolio. We got up to a number of doors and I had this light bulb moment and I was like, why am I not doing what I was doing in my previous W2 job? This is just a different product or service, right? And once we flipped that switch on, it was up and to the right. And so ever since then…Micah Johnson (07:28)
Right.Noble Crawford (07:33)
⁓ You know, we’ve grown in that space. We’ve done a number of contracts. We now help other people or individuals who are interested as well.Micah Johnson (07:42)
Okay, so let’s dive deeper. What is it exactly that you’re doing? How do you like so you’re doing STRs, but there are four federal agencies is who’s booking them. Where’s that? Like where’s that mix that seems like such two different things? Love it.Noble Crawford (07:54)
Yeah, got it. All right, so let’s get into it. Let’s get into it.So the federal government has people that move around and travel. They do trainings for different large groups of personnel. It could be something that’s troop movement related. It could be a number of different reasons why different federal agencies need to move people around. And when they move people around, guess what? They need to sleep somewhere, right? And so what happens is,
Typically when a federal agency under a government contract has a need, that need is in bulk or in volume. They need a lot of something. Well, that’s no different when it comes to lodging and accommodations and things like that. And so I’ll give you a quick example. And so one of our first deals here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, we came across this company that held a defense contract, okay? And it was a DOD contract. And so they were providing…
training and recertification for pilots and mechanics. And so they were sending these pilots and mechanics in, in intervals to do training and recertification. The pilots were coming in in 30 day intervals, increments. The mechanics were coming in in two week intervals. So once we learned this, we said, we’ve got inventory there. We want to be able to utilize that inventory to support this contract opportunity. And so long story short,
we were able to get in and provide at the time we had nine doors, right? So we had some one bedrooms and two bedrooms. Now here’s the beautiful thing about how the government pays for lodging. They pay under what is called a GSA rate, government services administration rate. Okay. Now that rate is a nightly rate. Okay. And that rate can fluctuate from market to market and region to region. But because these pilots were coming in and 30 day intervals for their training of recertification,
Micah Johnson (09:38)
Okay.Noble Crawford (09:47)
We said, hey, we’ve got some one bedrooms. We’re going to put them up in one bedrooms. And so we said, but the mechanics, they’re coming in two week intervals. So we’re going to put them in two bedrooms, two bathroom units.Now here’s the deal. OK, this is where it gets good. The GSA rate at that time was 167 a night. OK? So if you do the math, 167 a night times 30 nights for the one bedrooms that the airline pilots were in, or the helicopter pilots, is 5,000.
It’s like $5,010 a month. Okay. So we’re grossing $5,010 a month on a one bedroom apartment. We don’t own it. We’re just leasing it. We’re controlling it. The property management knows what we’re doing. They’re good with it, right? Because it’s not Airbnb. These are federal personnel coming in,
Micah Johnson (10:30)
Right?Noble Crawford (10:31)
right? And so, yeah. So we’re grossing 5K a month, but then our rent is only like $14.85, couple of hundred dollars in expenses. So the profit margins are nice, right? So we have five of those. So those five are grossing 25K a month. Now here’s the kicker.Micah Johnson (10:31)
Interesting.Right.
Noble Crawford (10:44)
Because there was mechanics coming in two week intervals and we put them in two bedroom, two bath units with a shared living, shared kitchen, we were able to charge that 167 a night rate, not once, but twice. So our two bedrooms were gross in 10,020 a month. We had four of those. So collectively those nine doors grossed 65K a month and as a five year contract. Okay. That’s the exact, that was our first bill.Micah Johnson (10:56)
Mm-hmm.Wow. Wow, man.
And it’s you and the loophole because you’re because you’re working with the government. It’s not technically an Airbnb. So you’ve literally rented a unit. Holy cow, man. That’s brilliant. ⁓
Noble Crawford (11:26)
Yeah, so it’s different, it’s niche.Micah Johnson (12:04)
It is. Again, it’s another thing I love about real estate. You can find your way into it and typically what benefits you is your past.Things I did before real estate helped me make way more money in real estate than I ever thought they would just from people skills in general from then the people you know and it just like it compounds on itself. Okay, so you take nine units you turn it into 65 K a month for a five year contract, which is incredible. Then what now? How’d you grow on top of that?
Noble Crawford (12:38)
Yeah. So we, once we got that first one, we were like, we’re loving this. We’re about to do this again. Right. And so we found another contract. was an up in North Dallas with another defense contractor. And that wasn’t, that one was a substantial, it’s substantial with this one, but the same sort of thing. Right. So we were, that was a little different where they had folks coming in at various intervals to train and stuff, but we were still putting them up and hosting them. Right. And so after we did the first couple, we were like, okay, let’s, let’s, let’s double down and let’s go after some larger stuff. And around that same time,Micah Johnson (12:44)
Yeah.Noble Crawford (13:07)
Ironically enough, COVID was started. Now, prior to COVID starting, we were running a short-term rental business, and we were scaling. And so we had already started to do what people in this space call direct bookings, where we were booking direct B2B type opportunities. We had stopped relying solely on Airbnb because we were having issues with the platform. so when COVID hit, one of the other verticals that we were doing at the time was ⁓ higher education.Micah Johnson (13:29)
Gotcha.Noble Crawford (13:37)
We weren’t doing student housing though. We were doing staff and faculty housing. So in instances where you have a professor or something like that coming in for an academic semester or an academic school year, we were housing them. So we’d already engaged in some direct booking across different verticals. Well, when COVID hits, ⁓ ironically enough, if you remember what happened, they started at some point to shut down the colleges and universities. And then when they did that, they shut down the dorms. ⁓ So like my son was staying in the dorm, had to come home.And so here’s what happened during that time when they shut down the dorms, they also shut down the airports. They had stopped air travel for a while, right? International air travel. And so there were international students stuck at colleges and universities with no place to stay and they couldn’t get home. Right? So we started initially hosting them and it just turned out as it turned out, we got a handful. Most of them were like Asian females. They had friends. We were converting whole units into renting by the bed and we ran that up, right?
Micah Johnson (14:06)
Mmm.All
Wow.
Noble Crawford (14:36)
And so, so now we’re, doing two types of direct bookings, the higher education space and the government contract space and a couple of others. And so, um, so what, wasn’t until we kind of get pushed through most of COVID before we really started to focus on growing the government contract stuff, right? Because we’re making revenue in other different areas. Um, and around that same time, I started having folks reach out to me, Hey, can you show me how to do this? You know, we want to learn so on and so forth. So I started taking on a couple of like, you know, mentees and things like that.Micah Johnson (14:37)
Right.Right.
Noble Crawford (15:06)
And then my focus became helping them get wins. know, my very first student won his first contract, 7.5 million in less than six months, right? And so then I started growing from there. So now I get the joy of doing it myself. My largest contract I’m currently involved in with my partners is a 400 door Navy contract out in San Diego. That is a $44 million contract.Micah Johnson (15:06)
Gotcha.Whoa.
Wow, so how does that one work? Are y’all owning the building or you’re still leasing out space and doing it that same way? So you go lease the space out and then sublet it to them basically. ⁓
Noble Crawford (15:42)
Yeah, basically. So ⁓ it’sa little bit different when we get to that level of scale, right? ⁓ So it’s a lot of inventory, obviously. So the conversations change at that level, right? We’re less having conversations with property managers and having conversations with property owners at that level, right? Whether it’s an investment group, know, a REIT, whatever it is, right? Because we’re bringing, ⁓ we’re getting inventory at scale, right? And we’re helping them.
Micah Johnson (15:46)
Right, that’s big man. Right.Gotcha.
Noble Crawford (16:10)
push their occupancy rate up to 100 % in some instances, right? And so it’s a win-win.Micah Johnson (16:13)
Right.And it like niche isn’t even the word for what you do, man. Like there needs to be another word for niche. It’s a niche niche. Like it’s such a it’s so right in there. But ⁓ man, it’s so fascinating.
And the fact you can scale it, that’s mind boggling too. So you’re literally living in this in-between space where you have the people and the money. What you need are the rooms. Where can I go put them? And if I make that connection, whoop, right out in the middle, I’m getting paid right here.
Okay, so what’s the, for your students when you’re teaching in, what’s like that light bulb moment for them where it clicks, okay, I know what we’re doing now. What’s typically that lesson that hits?
Noble Crawford (17:37)
Yeah, it’s usually when they understand the process of how to go out and find these opportunities and then the positioning to position yourself to be able to capture that business. Once they understand the mechanics around that and the strategy behind that, it very much becomes a rinse and repeat process, right? Once you understand ⁓ government contracting and federal procurement is really kind of like a skill or a trade set, if you will, right? And so it’s one of those trades, it’s kind of like a trade, once you’ve learned it, you’ve learned it.Right? And you can just rinse and repeat over and over again. so typically that first light bulb moment is, that’s how this works. Right? And then it’s off to the races.
Micah Johnson (18:07)
Gotcha.Right.
What’s one of the biggest things that they need to know when it when it comes to so they’re going out and going to look for the contract first, right? So go find the DOD or the government contract first, then go find the places and merge them. Is that typical move?
Noble Crawford (18:31)
Good question, good question.So I will back up just a little bit and I’ll say the very first step is they need to have their entity or their company registered to do business with the federal government. That’s the first question you got. You have to be in the federal government’s vendor database, right, to be able to pursue these opportunities in most cases. So if you have an existing entity or some people will start a newer one, right.
Micah Johnson (18:43)
⁓ noted.What’s that say?
Noble Crawford (18:58)
But you need to go to sam.gov, kind of like Uncle Sam, sam.gov. That’s where you begin the process of registering your entity to become a vendor for the federal government. Once you fully completed your registration, you avail yourself to 400 plus different federal agencies that purchase products and services. And so that’s step number one.Micah Johnson (19:20)
Okay.Noble Crawford (19:24)
Once you’re in there and you’re able to then find these opportunities and things like that, then it is like you said, it’s a matter of matching the opportunity to the type of inventory that they’re looking for. The example I used initially was multifamily. However, we also play in the single-family space and in the hotel space. It gives it even a little bit more niche. I’ll you a quick example. I had a student.Micah Johnson (19:45)
Right.Noble Crawford (19:51)
⁓ When a VA contract whereby they, ⁓ this opportunity through the VA, they wanted to house veterans that were near the VA medical facility because they had to stay nearby because they had a procedure done. It was post-op, know, follow-up appointments. So they needed to stay nearby for the next three to six months, right? But the VA wanted to place either one or two veterans per bedroom, but the VA was paying per head.Micah Johnson (20:09)
Gotcha.Gotcha.
Noble Crawford (20:20)
per night. Okay. So similar to my example earlier, now you’ve got six people in a three bedroom property at a nightly rate for an extended period of time on a five year contract, right? Cause a lot of these are multi-year contracts. Okay. So that’s the, that, that’s an example of like a single family. So yeah, another example of like the hotel space. So I’ll teach my, my mentees and my students how to broker hotel space, right? With some of the big flag brand properties, but effectively, ⁓Micah Johnson (20:24)
Nice.Right.
Noble Crawford (20:50)
You know, if the agency needs a massive number of hotel rooms, you can go in and you can get those rooms under contract and then sell it back to the government. Okay, that is a thing. It’s hotel brokerage. Yeah.Micah Johnson (21:00)
Really? That’swhy? How do you put them under contract? You’re going in as your entity and booking them? So basically getting a room block?
Noble Crawford (21:08)
Yeah,effectively, company has a contract with the hotel for the inventory and your company will have a contract with the agency ⁓ for said inventory for whatever length of time is needed, right? So it’s effectively like two contracts sitting there and you’re sitting in the middle managing both of those.
Micah Johnson (21:19)
Right.Interesting, man. I’m fascinated. just, got questions ripping through my mind on this, of how you capitalize on it. ⁓ How many students are you working with now? How many folks you got in your group?
Noble Crawford (21:42)
Um, not that many. So I wrapped up, um, kind of a group coaching model that I was doing last year. I wrapped it up Q4 last year. I’ve got some one-on-one mentees that I’m currently working with. And so, uh, but I, I take a handful of those at a time or whatever. Um, so not a significant amount. I would say, you know, less than 10 at this point. Yeah.Micah Johnson (21:53)
Gotcha.Right on. Well, I mean, you’re still
running the business too. And that’s where the group coaching kind of gets hard where the one-on-one really one, it pays your, your emotional paycheck a little more. Cause you get to actually work with people and, you got that fire, man. Like a heck, I’m just getting hyped up talking to you. couldn’t imagine talking to you about like the nitty gritty of here, how we go do this. Cause I’d probably just be outside knocking on doors before I knew what I was doing. That’s how hyped up I’d be. Cause again, man, you’re just showing.
There’s a lot of ways to be successful in this industry. does not have to be cookie cutter. Thinking outside the box is highly rewarded.
and you’re literally doing it without even owning the property. Normally we say, you know, make money or earn your and make money using other people’s money. You’re not just using other people’s money. You’re using other people’s property too. You got like OPP and OPM, man. You’re killing it. OPP, you know me. Come on.
Noble Crawford (22:59)
Yeah, yeah,Micah Johnson (23:03)
It’s the,Noble Crawford (23:03)
100%.Micah Johnson (23:04)
I’m just man, I’m gonna be thinking about this after this episode for quite some time. It’s like, I have never heard of that, of being able to have this over here and then even just go rent the space yourself and then rent it in the middle so that they connect. is, that’s mind boggling me.Noble Crawford (23:21)
It’s different. It’s different. I’ll takea couple other, I’ll share a couple other things with you. ⁓ So one of the questions that I get commonly from my students is, ⁓ okay, let’s say you land a 50 door or hundred door deal, right? And let’s say it’s multifamily deal, but it’s like 50 or a hundred doors or whatever. And so they first ask, are these furnished deals? And like, yes, they’re very much furnished. And they’re like, how do you afford to furnish all of that inventory? And my quick answer is we don’t.
We don’t furnish it. We don’t pay for buying all this furniture for all this inventory. We lease it. Right? And that lease price, that monthly lease price is in the markup that we’ve sold it back to the agency for. Right? Yeah.
Micah Johnson (24:05)
⁓ man, man,and heck, I didn’t even know you could lease that much furniture, right? It’s like all these different ideas that most people would discount themselves on. Well, I can’t do that because I can never buy all that and I can never do all this and I can never do all this. And you’re literally living in this space saying, okay, that’s not a problem. I can just go do this. I’ve got this piece over here to plug into. Okay, I got some more questions on the contracts themselves. Just.
How do you like, okay, you’re registered. Now what? Right? You’re in the space. How do you find out who has one? And then how do you go about who do you were talking to to win it?
Noble Crawford (24:43)
Yeah, yeah, good question.So ⁓ some opportunities you can find, you you get registered, some of them you can find right there in the SAM portal, right? And you can search for them, you can find them in the SAM portal. And then there are other portals too that you can get access to. Now, when you, let me back up a little bit. When you register, you’re going to receive two, what they call identifiers, if you will, two codes. The first one you’ll receive in the registration process is called a UEI, unique entity identifier.
Micah Johnson (24:52)
Okay.Noble Crawford (25:13)
It’s a 14 or 16 alphanumeric code specific to your entity. Everybody gets issued one during the registration process. During the second part of the registration process, once you’ve finished that part, you’ll receive what is called a CAGE code, C-A-G-E. That is a Department of Defense code, a DOD code, that they issue to every federal vendor. So every federal vendor will end up with a UEI and a CAGE code. Once you have those two,then you’re ready to rock and roll, right? And then when you’re inside of these portals looking for these different opportunities, you’re basically looking for the ones where they need lodging, accommodations, housing, things like that, right? And ⁓ then you can kind of pick and choose to some extent which ones you want to pursue and which ones you don’t, right? Because they vary in scale and scope and length and so on and so forth. So you can certainly, there’s certainly five year ones out there, three years, one year project, but they’re shorter.
Micah Johnson (25:54)
Okay.Noble Crawford (26:10)
compressed ones, right? You might find a five-figure deal, and it’s only for like a weekend, right? They only need X amount of inventory over a weekend or over a week or two, and it’s a quick 50, 60, 70 grand, right? And so it’s a matter of just determining which ones you want to pursue. And then once you’ve discovered which one you want to go after, there is always what is called a scope of work or performance work statement that lists everything, all of their requirements.Micah Johnson (26:17)
Okay.Right.
Noble Crawford (26:39)
for the project, right? It’ll say sometimes, hey, you need to be in a specific radius of this address within like 10 miles. It’ll say the property needs to be AAA rated maybe, or it might say, you know, the fire code has to be current. Like it’ll have all the requirements. And then you go source the properties that meet those requirements, right? So then you go, that’s when you start doing your outbound outreach to try to find the property, whether it be single family, multifamily or hotel.Micah Johnson (26:40)
Okay.Noble Crawford (27:06)
that meet the requirements. And then you start engaging with property management, ownership, stuff like that to find out, hey, what’s the best rate I can get for this block of inventory that I need for X amount of time, right? Because before you go back to the agency and say, we can do this project for X amount of dollars. You need to know what your expenses are, right? So in order to know what your expenses are, you need to have the conversation with the ownership team or what have you. Get all your expenses itemized, determine what your markup is going to be.Micah Johnson (27:19)
Right.Right.
Noble Crawford (27:35)
and then present it back to the agency. Right. So that’s in a high level. That’s kind of the process.Micah Johnson (27:41)
So what’s it, is it hard to win one of those government contracts? Are you competing with a lot of people? What’s really happening in that space?Noble Crawford (27:48)
Yeah, good question. Good question.I love this question. So ⁓ it’s not easy, but it’s simple. OK, so what do mean? So if it were easy, everybody would be doing it. So it’s not easy necessarily, But it’s simple from the fact that it’s process-based. So if you just connect the dots, if you just follow the order of things, it’s very process-based, then you can go from A to Z and close out a deal, right? Which is what I teach, right? And so
Micah Johnson (28:00)
Right.Noble Crawford (28:17)
So it’s simple from that aspect. what was that? the other part of your question?Micah Johnson (28:24)
How do you actually win one? Like how long does it take? What’s that? So you’re following that process. Do you lose sometimes? Is someone else doing it at the same time as you? ⁓Noble Crawford (28:32)
yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. Sometimes,sometimes, ⁓ you know, somebody will present a better offer than what you have. The property is better. They got it at a better price point. You know, it got more amenities. So yeah, you’ll, you’ll run into that. ⁓ but in this space, if you, least the process that I teach anyway, if you follow it to the letter, ⁓ it’s less so, you know, am I going to win and more so how soon am I going to win it for how much and then how frequent.
Micah Johnson (29:01)
Right.Noble Crawford (29:02)
Right. Cause like I said, it’s a rinse and repeat type of model. Right. AndMicah Johnson (29:02)
Gotcha. Right.Noble Crawford (29:05)
so, ⁓ but you’re typically, you’re contacting the, the, the, property management or ownership group. You’re getting your rate locked in for whatever that asset type is. Right. calculating your expenses, putting your markup on it, and then presenting it to the agency. Right. And they’ll, they’ll look at like, ⁓ you were asking about how competitive it is. So in the initial phase, when people are kind of doing their due diligence, trying to find the property and stuff.It can seem to someone who’s green, right? It can seem fairly competitive. You might have 10 different vendors looking and, you know, trying to find a solution. But what ultimately ends up happening more often than not never fails. The number of actual companies that actually present a proposal to the agency sometimes is as small as one. Okay. And many times it’s two, three or four. And that’s it.
Micah Johnson (29:56)
Wow.Noble Crawford (30:00)
And so a lot of people will drop off in the process. They do what you kind of outlined earlier that I get something rattles them and they don’t know how to solve it. They don’t know how to think creatively and they just decide to no bid it. Right. And, you know, it is what it is. And so the amount of people actually, you know, submitting their pitching, their offering, it can be small at times. Now I will say this, the larger the deal, because there are some large ones. So like the California we won’t afford.Micah Johnson (30:16)
Right.Noble Crawford (30:29)
400 doors, I think there was 13 total companies trying to get it, get that deal. Right. And so, ⁓ so that, that, I mean, was eight figures, right? So. Yeah.Micah Johnson (30:34)
Okay.Well, still one out of 13. That’s not that many.
That’s not like. That’s still not that much, right? Like that’s that’s still in the fact that folks drop out along the way and it took you a while to get to the 400 door deal. So it shows that for people getting in upfront, there’s you can get started and actually get some traction here with these. The five figure deals you’re talking about the ones that are you. You can really start getting it and.
Noble Crawford (31:02)
absolutely. 100%.Micah Johnson (31:07)
Now, do you have to call the government at all or is that really just an all electronic thing?Noble Crawford (31:12)
So typically during that phase of, here’s what we’re looking for. Hey, here’s what we’ve got for you before you present your package to them. Typically within that phase, the only outreach you’re typically making to an agency is if you have questions, right? And sometimes some of them will have a Q &A period. We’ll take questions up until this date, then we’re going to cut them off, right? Because we got to make a decision, you know? ⁓ But outside of that, you’re not really, ⁓ everything is in the scope of work.Micah Johnson (31:27)
Gotcha.person.
Noble Crawford (31:41)
Like literally everything that you need to know. And that’s called work can be lengthy sometimes, you know, it can be 60 pages, right? But I’ll tell you this much. Half of that is legalese, right? 30 of them legalese that is not wildly like it’s repetitive stuff. And the meat of what you typically are looking for is going to be, what property type, okay. How many, okay. Location. Okay. And what amenities those four things is what you’re looking for. Right.And if you can solve for those four things right there, then you’ve got enough to go ahead and submit something back to the agency.
Micah Johnson (32:19)
And what’s the submission look like? Is it a form that you fill out that’s on their website or is it a package you got to create?Noble Crawford (32:25)
Typically,is, at least for the service offering that we provide, typically it’s going to be more narrative based and it’s presented in a PDF. Okay. Now some of them will, some of the agencies will say, here, fill out this spreadsheet and itemize your pricing. Some of them will say that and you’ll have to respond with that. Sometimes there is a form, a governmental form, it’s called a 1449 that they’ll ask for on occasion. But usually you’ll fill out a 1449 once you win a contract.
So, more often than not, it’s something you start writing like a Word document and then convert it to a PDF for submission. And you put your pricing in there and all.
Micah Johnson (33:02)
Gotcha and a typicaldoes the format pretty much remain the same you’re hitting the same points at the same time each pdf
Noble Crawford (33:09)
More often than not, does. However, good question. You can find some opportunities whereby the agency will be very granular. They’ll say, we need it in a 12 point font, double spacing, you know, all of this stuff. And if you don’t follow that to the letter, automatic disqualification, right? So for my people out there that don’t like to read, you know, you got to use an AI or you got to do something, but you can’t miss the details.Micah Johnson (33:29)
Okay.Right. No, that
makes sense. Government works all about the details and stuff like that because it’s bureaucracy.
It’s red tape. You just got to make sure you’re hopping from hoop to hoop to hoop and don’t let the easy things knock you out. OK, no, well, I could go on and on about this stuff, man. Like I’m genuinely just razzed about it. But thanks for presenting what you talked about today, like a whole new way to look at real estate, even for myself. So for those that are out there listening and have really enjoyed this, what’s the best way for them to find out more about you and follow along what you have going on?
Noble Crawford (34:04)
Yeah, absolutely. So they can all reach out to me on Instagram. That’s usually where I’m hanging out, right? ⁓ My Instagram handle is noble noble.crawford.3. So noble.crawford.3. ⁓ I’m not so big that I don’t still respond to my own DMs. You know, I made them in there. And so, but that’s the best place.Micah Johnson (34:22)
Gotcha. I’m to follow you.Hell yeah, man. I’m fixing to follow you. for everyone listening and watching in, check the show notes for ⁓ Noble’s Instagram link. We’ll make sure you have it there so you can reach out to them. Noble, man, thanks again for being here. I really appreciate your time and your story. Just pulling the hood back on something that a lot of us here have never even heard before. I really appreciate it. think we need more folks out there doing it like you, finding those creative things. That’s awesome. So if you’ve been doing
Noble Crawford (34:49)
Yeah, thanks for having me, bro. I appreciateit.
Micah Johnson (34:51)
Absolutely,man. Thanks for being here. If you enjoyed listening or watching this today, please make sure to like this episode. Share it with someone else that you think would get value out of it as well. And please don’t forget to subscribe. We appreciate every single one of you that follows along with us. We’ve got more conversations coming up with operators just like Noble out there building something real in the industry. Thanks for joining us today. We’ll see you on the next episode.
