How Follow-Up Turned Into a Profitable Real Estate Flip | Tom & Susan Symons

Tom And Susan Symons (00:00)
one of the platforms we use uses AI to scrape the MLS with filters that we put in and one of which is 60 days on market or more and just like any other lead group about 90 % of the people say no.

not interested. It’s all volume. Yeah. But when you go back to that list once they’ve been on the market for 150 days,

they’re much more interested in talking to you.

Michelle Kesil (02:12)
Hey everybody, welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil, and today I’m joined by someone I’m looking forward to chatting with, Tom and Susan Symons who are real estate investors focusing on wholesaling and flipping. So excited to have you guys here.

Tom And Susan Symons (02:29)
Thank you. Excited to be here. We’re excited to be here.

Michelle Kesil (02:33)
Perfect, let’s dive in. First off, for those not familiar with you and your work, can you share what your main focus is?

Tom And Susan Symons (02:39)
⁓ I think for the most part we are wholesaling. We are doing some fix and flips. in the middle of our second one as we speak. Tom has a contracting background, so that’s really benefited us as we’ve gotten started. We do have a buy and hold rental that’s brand new for us as well, and we hope to expand all of that within time. We’ve just been doing this a little under two years, so we’re still fresh ⁓ in that and open-minded to learn everything that we need to.

Michelle Kesil (03:04)
Awesome. And which markets do you operate in?

Tom And Susan Symons (03:06)
Mostly we’ve been in, we live in Texas, we’re in the DFW area, so we have focused kind of mid-state around the Waco area, but we just recently branched, and we’ll do anywhere in Texas, we’re open to that, but we just branched into the mid-section of Tennessee that we’ve just opened up in the last couple of weeks. We will be expanding that fairly quickly because one of our goals is to be working in all the states.

that we travel to on a regular basis. And that would be the Virginia area, Maine, Kentucky area. We have family there. We family in all those areas. Washington state. And if we can go and take care of some business while we’re visiting that, that would be great.

we’re thinking about possibly moving to Tennessee. we’ve got offers in right there now on investment properties. We occasionally get from family members or friends kind of off market stuff. I was trying to help ⁓ a family friend with a foreclosure here recently, but for the most part, Texas and Tennessee.

Michelle Kesil (04:10)
Great. And what do you feel have been some of the main keys that have allowed your business to grow and run successfully?

Tom And Susan Symons (05:05)
I think foundationally we join, we are members of actually three different mentorships but mostly involved in two and those have really given us our foundations of what we needed to know.

Both communities have large support systems. We can go to them any day, any time. And they have been foundational in guiding us and leading us that we always have access to modules and contracts and tools and all the things that we need to help us be successful. So yeah, I think that would be it. One of the things that I found really helpful is when there’s large meetings and several speakers.

because if you were mining gold, that’s where you find the nuggets. You always leave with five or six things that we’ve avoided a lot of mistakes by those.

nuggets that we found in the conferences and we have a meeting with one of our groups weekly and another one daily. And they’re all people involved in what we’re doing. For instance, the flip that we’re doing right now

We were talking to a gentleman who was kind of a mentor to us and he said, well, I don’t flip anything unless I can make, you know, like a hundred thousand dollars on it. And I’m like, well, that’s going to cut you out of a lot of the business. And then I thought about it, said we’re wholesaling. So we should be keeping the very, very best ones and flipping them, which we started to do, which led to this, this job, this job we’re doing right now. And it’s it, there’s been bumps in,

but there’s bumps in anything and it looks like it’ll be a really good deal for And those groups are great networking opportunities for us too, whether it’s in person or online, but we’ve really gotten one-on-one relationships with a lot of these people and so that’s really benefited us too. Different experience levels for everybody. I would say that’s one of the keys if you think about it is networking. In our Monday

work. I needed some help. I had exhausted every bit of knowledge I had on trying to help that gentleman with his foreclosure. one person said, hey, I just met somebody and they put us together and that led, we weren’t actually able to help this gentleman in the end, but she brought in at least three or four other people to look at the property. We gave it every opportunity there possibly was.

And so networking is a key to this.

Michelle Kesil (07:37)
Yeah, absolutely. What have been some of the obstacles or challenges that you’ve had to overcome in this career?

Tom And Susan Symons (07:44)
ourselves. Yeah, I think we’re our own biggest obstacle.

I think lead generation has been a learning process for us. We’ve started with one of our groups really focuses on paper leads and we have another mentorship that focuses on MLS listed properties. And we’re trying to find the kind of niche in the middle of all of that, doing a little of both. And so I think that’s our biggest challenge is finding out where we need to make the focus.

and developing that with and tools are abundant in both of these mentorships. They provided us with, I think, tons of different tools that are critical in how we come up with our deals and how we make our offers. And so yet now it’s just kind of finding what our best opportunity for us particular works out to be. And we’ve it took a while to hit that groove. And I don’t think it was, you know, there’s a learning curve to any everything. And I would

say that judging from the people that are in our networks that are new to it and going through what we did a year ago, think pretty much everybody goes through that. Every once in a while there’s a guy or a girl that hits the ground running and just never looks back. But I think the rest of us, it’s a real grind at first. And then one day, once your marketing funnel’s full, you start getting busier than you need to be.

And that’s kind of where we’re right at the verge of that. So we’re just learning how to have help come and help us in our business. We were trying to do it all and we could for a long time, but we’ve kind of come to the point where we need some help and that’s just taking place as we speak. We hired our first person what a week ago. And she’s from one of our mentorships. So that was what was great too.

Michelle Kesil (10:01)
Awesome. What are you guys excited about opportunity wise or projects that you’re wanting to move into?

Tom And Susan Symons (10:09)
A lot. Yeah, there’s so much out there it’s hard to concentrate on one thing. We’ve talked about RV parks.

We’re old enough that, yeah, storage units, we want to be retired and we like what we’re doing right now, but we have to be here constantly to keep that revenue going. Whereas if we had something that was more passive, we’d be able to do a little bit more of the retirement. We’re at different, obviously, we’re at a different stage of life than a lot of the young investors that are in a lot of our groups that we’re a part of. for them, at a different, they can kind

of watch this work and we’re kind of like, right, we’re ready. We both just retired from our full-time jobs and this is kind of our extra income as we retire and we’d like for it to eventually be more passive, you know, than it is. And, but we’re enjoying it because this is our learning time. We have to go through this and we have to learn what we’re doing. But yeah, we see other opportunities for some different things and we’ve met other people that can move us into those areas.

eventually as well too. But as we’ve learned in one of our, a couple of our groups, a couple of our mentorships is one of them has the hedgehog concept and it’s like focus on one thing and let’s really work on it and get it, get it, you know, functioning really well and be confident in it. And that’s what we’re, that’s what we’re trying to do now. We have, we’re not just wholesaling, but we’re, like I said, we’re fixing and flipping, but we feel confident in the ones that

doing. We’re not trying to do multiple flips at a time. We’re doing one. We’re doing it the best that we know how and have it be successful and then start looking for the next one.

Michelle Kesil (11:50)
Awesome. And are you looking to solve or scale anything right now?

Tom And Susan Symons (11:58)
Yes,

one of the platforms we use uses AI to scrape the MLS with filters that we put in and one of which is 60 days on market or more and just like any other lead group about 90 % of the people say no.

not interested. It’s all volume. Yeah. But when you go back to that list once they’ve been on the market for 150 days,

they’re much more interested in talking to you.

we’re getting, that’s who we just hired and there’s, we let that go for so long and then realized man, there’s real gold there. In the follow up. In the, you know, the 100 day follow up that we had to hire somebody to bring it and have them start to do that for us. So. We use a platform that’s auto generates out offers and it accompanies a contract along with it.

And so we don’t see the initial contracts and offers that are sent out. We don’t even see we haven’t even looked at the house yet. So when we get contacted back by the realtor, then it’s our time to kind of reevaluate it if they’re even interested because it’s just a percentage off of the listing to us. But it’s it’s all on volume. We’re sending out between 60 to 70 offers every day with this auto generated offer. And so it’s all based on volume to get to the right one that really works. In fact, that the flip that we’re doing

was a follow-up on one of those and the actual property that we were following up on didn’t work and we always ask the agent at the end of our conversation, hey, know, keep us in mind if something comes across your desk. And goes, well, I’ve got something now I’d like to show you. that’s the one we’re flipping now. That’s the one we’re flipping now. So it’s all, this one is all about building relationships with agents.

We’ve really began to do that in the area where we’ve been focusing and now that we’ve just started Tennessee, we’ve kind of started over in that area trying to start building some relationships there. Again, the other value to going back through that list, even if they don’t work again, that person is thinking about you and your business when something comes across, you know, a house that won’t qualify for a conventional mortgage or even a buyer that may not.

qualify for a regular mortgage, we could do a lease purchase with them. So we leave that open to the agents. And we make the agent aware of that. so then you have, bird dogging is the wrong word for that, I guess, but they’re keeping you in mind and they’re going to send you because it’s another revenue source that they don’t have to work terribly hard for. So we found some and see good.

potential there.

Michelle Kesil (15:33)
Yeah, absolutely. And so what are some of the major lessons that you have learned so far that you wish you knew earlier?

Tom And Susan Symons (15:43)
How long do you have?

⁓ I’ll tell you the very first lesson that we learned. The very first house that we put under contract, or one of the very first houses that we put under contract that we decided we were going to make at our flip. And that was our first one. And luckily we started on a very small house that was very inexpensive. But Tom being a contractor as a background, we didn’t hire an official inspector, but Tom walked it. We walked, was a peer and beam foundation. And in Texas, you don’t see a lot of newer homes that way. They’re mostly older homes.

So we walked it, we didn’t see anything that we couldn’t handle, mostly cosmetic, a new roof though, and new air conditioning and everything cosmetic. What we didn’t do is that we didn’t look under the house and didn’t think too hardly about it because the gentleman had had a renter in this house for quite some time. And as we got it finished and we put it on the market and one of the first contracts that we got on the house hired an inspector to do a full inspection. And it turns out that underneath the house,

and popping had completely disintegrated underneath the house. So that was a $12,000 lesson that we had to do. And now it’s a rental house for us. It’s no longer a flip house. we fixed all of the piping, replaced it, and there’s now a renter in it. So that was one of our very first big lessons. We paid a little bit of tuition for that lesson. checked under the house as well as in the house.

also just kind of I think learning.

You know, when you’re talking to off market is really getting the motivation of that person before you can even try to make a deal. We’ve really been, you know, that has been a focus from one of our mentorships and we’ve really learned the importance of that. If they’re not really motivated, you’re never going to work a deal. And so you have to find out what that is. And that’s been real important. I think other than that, it’s really finding in buyer lists for us. We have not focused on that really at all.

for us until just recently. It was all about acquisitions and getting contracts because one of our mentorships offered Dispo teams that we would just turn it over to them, JV with them, and they would find our in-buyer. And we would focus on just getting additional contracts. We’re now beginning to kind of learn to build our own in-buyer list. We’re just starting on that ⁓ ourselves. And yeah, it’s just utilizing your community. I think that’s one of our biggest things.

the experience within your community because they’re all willing to help. All welcome to help.

Michelle Kesil (18:06)
Yeah, absolutely. And how did you find like the organizations and community and networking groups that you’re in?

Tom And Susan Symons (18:13)
Yeah.

So a year and a half ago, a little over a year and a half ago, guess, as I was preparing to retire from the job that I had been doing, we knew we needed some other kind of income to come in. We didn’t have great retirement programs for ourselves. So we knew we were going to need an additional source and we wanted something that we enjoyed and something that would be different than what I’d been doing in the past. was a nurse. I was a clinical nurse educator for 30 something years. So I was ready to just

change and be something different. I found in Dallas area a lady named Teresa Todd that has the RAIN Network, W-R-E-I-N, which was for the Women’s Real Estate Investment Network. And I happened to find that right as they were having their national meeting in Dallas. So that was one of the first things I went to and networked with a bunch of women there. At that particular meeting, we met the first mentor that we decided to have after that, Clifford Walker.

and he became our mentor from that point forward and learned all of our foundations from Clifford and that group has grown as well. In the middle of all of that, Tom and I have been watching a lot of YouTube on RJ Bates and Titanium University and they really focus on wholesale and we really wanted to get really good at that and so we joined his group and those are the two mentorships that we’re a part of right now and we couldn’t have been more grateful to be a part of those.

because we have learned so much from each one and had so much support in each one. yeah, nothing but great things to say about both. both of them are great, but for us personally, we weren’t getting exactly what we needed, but in the aggregate by being in both of them. And it’s interesting, I had a completely different.

view of both groups until we met face to face. And then there’s something that doesn’t transfer online. in both…

In both groups, once you met face to face, you realized it was much better than you actually thought it was. And it was great before. And you realized just how much both groups were interested in the real estate investment business, making it their…

not just livelihood but life. And for the right reasons. Yeah, and for the right reasons. We’re very faith-based in what we do and that was real important to us that each of the mentorships that we were a part of have that as a focus as well. And we found that in both communities. So we do everything, try to do everything for the right ethical, the right foundations, and it has proven to be successful for us.

Michelle Kesil (20:45)
Yeah, that’s amazing. Well, before we wrap up here, if someone wants to reach out, connect, learn more, where can people find you?

Tom And Susan Symons (20:52)
Wow, okay, well we live in Tolar, Texas, about an hour south of Fort Worth, so we’re local to the DFW area, but they can reach out to us. ⁓ Our email address is [email protected] That’s the name of our business, and just a little tidbit of what the AAR stands for, because we kind of feel like this is funny. We have a 14-acre ranch here in this area. We raise some longhorns.

grandkids just a little bit about us all over but when we bought this ranch we decided that as Texas is concerned 14 acres is very small so we decided to name it almost a ranch so AAR in our business that’s what that stands for in our business as well.

Michelle Kesil (21:35)
Perfect. We’ll appreciate your time and your story. Thank you for being here.

Tom And Susan Symons (21:38)
Yeah, thank you guys. thanks for having us. you for having us. Have a great day.

Michelle Kesil (21:41)
Of course.

And for those tuning into the show, if you got value, make sure you’ve subscribed. We’ve got more conversations with operators like Tom and Susan who are building real businesses. We’ll see you on our next episode.