How a Projected $150K Real Estate Profit Turned Into a Six-Figure Loss

Adam Devine (00:00)
Since the market’s softening too, we have a deal right now that very likely could be a six-figure loss. It was a wholetail deal. We bought historical home, 3,000 square feet, in a very quiet area in Connecticut, very wealthy. We thought we could make a quick hundred fifty thousand dollars, and it looks like it’s gonna be the opposite. So it’s part of the game. Every now and then you’re gonna take a loss. Make sure that your company’s set up for success so that if you do have a loss, it doesn’t affect your overall numbers for the month. So your bottom line, whatever your acquisition fees are, it might just be a little blip in the system.

Issa Hanna (02:04)
Welcome back to another episode of the Real Estate Pros Show. I’m your host, Issa Hanna, and today I have Adam Devine here to share his knowledge with us. Adam, welcome.

Adam Devine (02:12)
Issa, what’s going on, brother? Appreciate you having me. Thank you.

Issa Hanna (02:16)
Appreciate you coming on, sharing your knowledge with our viewers. You’ve—you did three hundred deals last year. So, so you’re a major operator in the wholesale world, and you got a lot of insights. So with that, can you kind of run down what you’re focused on nowadays and kind of like a day-to-day for you?

Adam Devine (02:34)
Yeah, absolutely. We did just under three hundred last year, and we are predominantly a home-buying company. We acquire and resell. So you can—I don’t like to use the word wholesale. That is the space that we’re in. We have made a pivot to take title to as much as we can. As you see, there’s a lot of legislation that’s coming down the pike. So we stay in our lane, focus on what we’re good at, avoid shiny object syndrome, and stick to what we know. You know, when you start to get off the tracks, that’s when the train hits you. So you buy homes, sell. Very simple concept, and just strive to get better every day.

Issa Hanna (03:11)
Simple, simple concept, spoken like a true veteran in the game. You stay in your lane and don’t go after the shiny objects because that’s where you’re gonna lose a lot of money. So, definitely spoken like a true vet in the game. We were talking earlier, and you said one of your strengths that you’ve built up throughout all these years is acquiring the property. So, how’d you get to be so good at it?

Adam Devine (03:38)
Well, we have a really coachable team, and we’ve instilled that characteristic trait and quality into our culture for the folks to understand what it is that is going to be instilled to have success. And it’s just—it’s due every day. You have to get better. You have to push yourself to be the best salesperson there is in this business. The game is ever-changing. And for you to stay on top, that means you’re gonna have to hone your craft to be as good as you can be. So, for us, it’s going through weekly sales training. We have several different coaches. We’ll also fly in a coach or a consultant every quarter to work with the team. And it’s something that our guys take very seriously. In addition to that, we’re predominantly all athletes. I’m a hockey player. My business partner’s a hockey player. We have several folks that have played professional hockey that work on our team now. So there’s something about finding the professional or college athlete that differentiates themselves from the rest of the pack. It’s that intestinal fortitude, grit, resilience, perseverance that these folks have that a lot of other individuals just don’t have when the time gets tough. So it’s a matter of finding the right people that are willing to be coachable and train and seek mastery in their craft.

Issa Hanna (05:39)
One hundred percent. Sports, being an athlete at a young age, instills lifelong discipline. As somebody who’s a former college football athlete, you know, trained multiple years in in combat sports, I can totally attest to that because when you’re in middle school, it’s summer break, you wanna hang out with your friends, you gotta show up for the team. You gotta, and it’s the same in any team sport, any sport, period. So, hundred percent, I can attest to that. And with that, I’d like to ask you, we all start on the bottom. We all start on this rocky road in real estate somewhere. A lot of us just kind of fall into it and like, hey, I can make some real money in this. So I’d like to get your origin story. How’d you—how’d you get into this?

Adam Devine (06:28)
Yeah, great question. So I finished up school in twenty sixteen. I played hockey, and when hockey was done, I needed to figure out what was my outlet. Decided to go into real estate after seeing an Instagram video of a guy named Nick Ruiz. You don’t really see his name too much in the industry anymore. This guy out of Wisconsin talked about how you can buy houses and flip them without taking ownership. And my mind blew up. This sounds too good to be true. So I could do that. Went out, fell on my face for a couple years. Simultaneously, at the same time, I’m working for my business partner. So I reached out to him, Bob Lachance. I know you guys know who he is. I ended up going to be a sales manager at his virtual assistant company.

And then he had fired me right before my twenty-sixth birthday, literally the day of, come to think of it. So ended up getting fired. Stayed in touch. Six and a half months later, Perch Rock forms, and the rest is history. So always been in real estate. If you look at my PI assessment, you definitely wouldn’t hire me. So, humbly speaking, I’ve worked for myself and just been very thankful to surround myself with the right people. I consider Bob someone who’s more than just a business partner and a a mentor and someone who’s helped me along the way to get to where I’m at today. So, yeah, it’s been a fun journey. That’s where we’re at, and we’re enjoying the moment and pushing forward every chance we get.

Issa Hanna (07:58)
I love that story. And you have a great mentor in the game. Our founder knows him. So, you know, you guys, you guys, you young guys at home that that are watching that are—they’re like, hey, let me let me watch this show so that I can maybe get some ideas on how to get things moving. Find a mentor. Every successful people in the game learn from somebody else. Don’t be too shy to ask questions, and don’t come into it expecting to get something. You know, if anything, expect to give. So, I just wanted to pull that out of what you said, as, you know, from somebody like you, super experienced. You know, you you’re just dropping golden knowledge on us, like, left and right now, just by talking. So I’m getting excited. And I wanted to give kind of like a little warning to our new viewers, right? So every investor, including myself, has a time where we had to pivot, like kind of a real estate nightmare. You know, something went bad. We had to overcome it. Can you give us an example of a time you had to do that?

Adam Devine (09:03)
Yeah, for sure. We’re actually doing it right now, just to be completely frank. We’re exiting our rental portfolio in Jacksonville, Florida. We’re getting our butts handed to us. Started acquiring the doors back in 2023. Exited acquisitions around, I want to say, it was early 2025. And between third-party management, difficult neighborhoods, and poor tenants, we’ve failed to cash flow on them. In fact, they’ve been an incredible tax write-off, or a positive. I’m glad—yeah, they haven’t cash-flowed. And if you talk to enough investors, you’ll hear them tell you that rentals aren’t really the way unless you’re proactively self-managing and you’re hands-on. So, not against rentals. It’s definitely a great avenue. There’s plenty of people that have built wealth doing it. Make it your priority to manage your portfolio. If you’re looking to just passively—if you’re the guy that says, I’m gonna go acquire, you know, 100, 200 doors and use third-party management, you’re likely never gonna cash flow.

This is a conversation I’ve had with plenty of investors that have built better portfolios than me. So, yeah, we’re struggling to get rid of that stuff. We’re down to, I believe it’s 10 doors. And, you know, if we can get rid of it, it’d be a better place.

Since the market’s softening too, we have a deal right now that very likely could be a six-figure loss. It was a wholetail deal. We bought historical home, 3,000 square feet, in a very quiet area in Connecticut, very wealthy. We thought we could make a quick hundred fifty thousand dollars, and it looks like it’s gonna be the opposite. So it’s part of the game. Every now and then you’re gonna take a loss. Make sure that your company’s set up for success so that if you do have a loss, it doesn’t affect your overall numbers for the month. So your bottom line, whatever your acquisition fees are, it might just be a little blip in the system.

Accept it, let it build character, teach you a lesson, and move on. It’s never a loss; it’s a lesson.

Issa Hanna (11:24)
100%, man. Wow. Spot on. Never a loss, always a lesson. And when you do speculate for these type of emergencies and it is in your budget and is in your—it’s in your financial plan, it doesn’t sting as much, you know. It still stings, but not as much. So, great, great advice, man. Like I said, we’re getting from you. And, you know, we are talking a little bit, but one thing we never touched on when we talked in our earlier conversation: future. So, five years from now, I look you up, Adam. I I interview you. I bring you back on the show. Where am I gonna see you?

Adam Devine (12:00)
Where am I going to be at in five years? Well, it’s a great question. I’m not sure where I’m going to be tomorrow, all pun intended. Yeah, listen, ideally we’re going to continue to hit it hard and pursue forward to be the best company we can be. As you know, this is a water-like business. It’s very fluid. So you have to be ever-changing and prepared for change. One of my favorite business books is a simplistic one, *Who Moved My Cheese?* The cheese in wholesale or investment real estate on the residential sector is constantly moving.

Whether you’re a home builder, a wholesaler, fix-and-flip operator, landlord, your cheese is constantly moving, even on the lending side. So you have to be prepared to see the foreseeable future. Join masterminds like yourselves, connect with other investors, data analytical companies, advisors. It’s the only way that you’re able to have your ear to the pavement and know what’s going on firsthand. So, there’s always going to be opportunity. There’s going to be the commoditization of buying and selling real estate. And there’s going to be folks that just want the easy button, which is go direct to the end—the end consumer. So, in our case, we’re the buyer. And what we do with the home after, it doesn’t really pertain to the seller’s interest. So I think, as you see the game evolve, there’s going to be multiple variables that either push people out of business because they can’t become profitable or scale, or they run into the challenge of capital and legislation. With more folks taking title to homes, that you will see less operators fighting for a bigger piece of the pie. So it’s—I—we’re heading into a good, a good market in the coming future. So, see what happens.

Issa Hanna (13:40)
See what happens. And that was one of the opportunities you spoke about, is people who aren’t as experienced as somebody like you falling out of the game and you picking up, that, you know, the slack that they they’re leaving behind because they’re not as experienced. So as the game changes and legislation and all that stuff, it it’s the experienced guys that are gonna stick around, like you, for sure. So, and then I—now I wanna ask your advice on business relationships, right? So you’ve been able to find a mentor. You’ve been able to build a team. You’ve, you wholesale homes. You talk to a lot of people. You come in contact with a lot of people. So you’re definitely a network builder, right? So, for people at home who just starting out, have no network, have no business relationships, no contacts, don’t know where to start, where would they start?

Adam Devine (15:15)
To each his own. Everybody’s at a different phase, location, network group, skill set. So just put one foot in front of the other and take action. Don’t be afraid to have conversations, talk to people. You know, lead with humility and vulnerability. There’s gonna be people that tell you no. Every no, you’re closer to a yes. So you just have to view this opportunity optimistically and be relentless. If you want something bad enough, you know, you’ll either find a way or find an excuse. So it’s really up to the operator and the person that wants to make something of themselves.

When it comes to finding a mentor, I got really lucky that just so happened to connect with Bob. And, you know, 10 years later, we’re still working together. Someone that’s had an immense amount of success over his tenure. I believe Bob’s been in the business now 20, 21 years. So it really is important that you lead with value, because if a mentor is going to put time and emphasis into working with you, they have to see something. It is a two-way road. It’s not, hey, just—there’s this young buck that comes by and is motivated and wants to work hard. Yeah, motivation’s crap at the end of the day. It’s how motivated are you or determined are you long after the motivation has passed away. So, yeah, you have to be able to bring value to that mentor and say, hey, this is what we’re gonna be able to do by bringing me on board and you teach me. And there’s a big piece that gets missed. It’s the loyalty aspect. Notice that we’re still working together 10 years later.

Plenty of people think the grass is greener on the other side, and it’s definitely not the case in this business. I’ve taken haircuts firsthand, and you want to be around a team. It’s a team sport. You’re only as good as the people to the right and your left, right? You think about a locker room, your stallmates. So thinking that you can go make more if you go off on your own is almost a sure bet that you make less money. I I’ve seen it play out plenty of times inside of our organization, other local competitors in the market. Again, you wish everybody best and success. It’s just—it’s tough when you go out there on your own. You think just—you think you have it all, and you realize that you’re on your own at that point.

Issa Hanna (17:16)
One hundred percent. You have no backup, you know, and you’re stronger as a unit. So when you’re making synergy with your partners, you know, you’re like a fist, you know. Five fingers go into a fist, not one. So you’re gonna break your finger if you try to poke somebody really hard, you know. Not gonna break that. True. So, a hundred percent. And I wanna give you the floor. People wanted to get a hold of you, you got something you wanna plug. Take it away, Adam.

Adam Devine (17:48)
Absolutely. If anyone has any questions, would like to reach out, you could find me on Instagram at @theadamdevine. You could reach out to me at [email protected]. Always happy to connect with folks. Constantly looking to buy more deals. We operate Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and a little bit of Northeast Pennsylvania. So if you ever get a deal, give us a holler. We are a true cash buyer. We have capital and ready to close. So, love to do business together.

Issa Hanna (18:16)
Definitely. Experienced, knowledgeable wholesaler. To our viewers at home, I hope you guys enjoyed this because it’s very rare that we get to talk to somebody so direct and literally every word that came out of his mouth is something you can take to the bank, you can write down and take notes. So, very, very valuable guest you are to our show, Adam, definitely. And I’d like to thank you so much for coming on, man.

Adam Devine (18:44)
Issa, appreciate you, my man. Pleasure being on the show. Thank you for having me.

Issa Hanna (18:50)
Thank you for being the guest. And to our viewers at home, if you guys enjoyed my conversation with Adam and want to see more just like it, make sure to hit like and subscribe. I talk to people every day that can bring us different knowledge on every aspect of the real estate industry. Until next time, the Real Estate Pros are out.