How iBuyHomes.com Buys & Sells in 30 States – Branden Grimshaw

Branden Grimshaw (00:00)
Guard your marketing dollars, meaning deploy them in the highest, obviously the highest profit centers. There’s a lot of people that I’ve met over the years that are going out of business or have gone out of business and it’s because the marketing dollars kind of got away from a conversion standpoint. And also be cautious on the retail. If you’re in the fix and flip space,

You know, be cautious on your, you know, your, you know, retail value of the assets and also the renovation estimates that you’re getting on the individual assets that you’re projecting. Because those numbers, you know, obviously can be off, you know, very quickly. So just make sure you budget appropriately. And then also in certain states like the Sun Belt type states, you know, just make sure you budget for the reduction in the retail value of the asset.

Over a six month hold. You can still buy during a declining market. You can still buy, renovate and sell during a declining market. You just have to budget, hey, I think it’s gonna go down 15 % in value or 10 % value over the next year. So you gotta factor in the 5 % or 7.5 % reduction in the asset value and buffering in a solid return on the capital.

Kristen Knapp (02:42)
Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m Kristen and I’m here with Branden Grimshaw, who’s the owner and founder of ibuyhomes.com. Great URL, wonderful URL. We’re going to talk all about how he built this in really, really impressive business. So thank you for being here, Branden.

Branden Grimshaw (02:56)
Appreciate you having me on.

Kristen Knapp (02:57)
So what drew you to real estate in the beginning?

Branden Grimshaw (02:59)
When I was in college, first semester of my freshman year of college, I was reading books on real estate investing and I called my father up and I told him I said, dad, I went to Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, Florida from Cincinnati, Ohio. So a thousand miles away. And I called my dad first, first semester freshman year. And I said, I know what I want to do and I don’t need to go to college anymore. And he goes, great. What do you want to do? I said, I want to be.

Kristen Knapp (03:22)
you

Branden Grimshaw (03:24)
real estate investor, I to buy rental properties, I want to buy and sell houses to make cash to be able to buy those rental properties. He goes, that’s great, you can read all the books you want, but you’re going to college, you’re going to finish. ⁓ that’s where I realized that after a couple of books and my dad being in the business in the rental space in Cincinnati, owning about 20 doors, I got to work on those as a kid and never had any interest in.

Kristen Knapp (03:35)
you

Branden Grimshaw (03:47)
and being a real estate investor when I was working on the properties, but then after I learned that it could be done differently, then I, you that was freshman year of college. And then I went through college, finished and literally started my real estate investing journey, April or whatever it was, July of 2004. And so, yeah, and ⁓ that’s where the hunger started. And then I used the time in college to learn and read and then.

I connected to a mentor. So right when I graduated, I was able to work underneath an individual in Palm Beach County and he measured me for two years. It was kind of like what I consider like a master’s degree in real estate. So we were, you know, ⁓ it was very, very productive two year period. And then I went out on my own in 2006. So I’ve had my company for almost 20 years now, buying and selling.

Single family homes in addition to buying rental properties as well.

Kristen Knapp (05:30)
Wow, I mean, that’s so amazing. People go to college and have no idea what they want to do with their lives afterward. And you just knew right away before you even stepped foot. And your dad was in the industry as well.

Branden Grimshaw (05:38)
I got lucky, I got lucky.

He was in the industry on the rental side only.

Kristen Knapp (05:44)
Yeah.

Was he a, you know, a source of help as you were getting started?

Branden Grimshaw (05:48)
Yeah, I mean, he helped me, you know, honestly, like I love my father. My dad works with me now in Cincinnati in our Cincinnati office as a project manager. He’s an amazing, he was an aerospace engineer, had a fantastic career in that space. But I learned a lot of what I wanted to do in real estate actually, which was the opposite of how he operated in the business. So I learned a lot of things that I didn’t want to do, you know, inside the space, like.

actually doing the renovations yourself. So I learned how to manage the process and build systems and processes around the business of flipping houses and rental properties as well.

Kristen Knapp (06:23)
Yeah, I’d love for you to talk more about your systems that you have in place.

Branden Grimshaw (06:26)
Okay, yeah, so we custom built and the buying and selling company, the iBuy Homes, the engine behind it, we built a custom software platform that we basically use is kind of like a virtual assembly line for processing in Sanofamily Homes. And that’s both on the wholesaling front and the retailing front. And so ⁓ the software basically works as a CRM on the front end. So all of our lead channels, the acquisition reps are all dialed into it. Everything from the

initiation of the lead all the way through to the contracts all the way through after we you know whether we wholesale it or we retail it if we close on it then it goes into like an asset management type portal and my asset manager then processes the files out and works with the the agents and the contractors to get the homes fixed up and sold.

Kristen Knapp (07:12)
Wow, yes, you guys have systems in place for sure.

Branden Grimshaw (07:15)
Yeah, that’s

just on the fix and flip and that’s just kind of a high level version of it. It’s very in depth. It’s kind of like at this point, it’s kind of built out like QuickBooks where we use 20 % of what we developed, but it’s still the 20 % is very effective at managing what we do.

Kristen Knapp (07:32)
Yeah.

Amazing. so tell us about kind of the impetus of iBuyHomes.com. When did you have the idea to actually kind of go on your own and really start something big?

Branden Grimshaw (07:42)
Yeah, so we had in the 2011, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 timeframe, we were buying and selling one of the top buying and selling companies in Palm Beach County, Florida at the county auctions. And so at some point in 2015, 2016, when all the hedge funds were taking over, they were buying based on, they were bid compressing us down to where we couldn’t make any money buying at the auctions.

I ended up going and connecting with an individual named Todd Hutchinson out of Orlando, Florida. Todd had started iBuyHomes.com back in the early 2000s and had it live, think it was like 2002, it was live. He was generating a ton of leads on iBuyHomes.com all over the country. I connected with him and then…

We ended up basically a year and a half later, we ended up working out an arrangement where I could purchase the domain and the business from him. And we ended up doing that in 2017. And we bought the brand, the URL from him. yeah, and then after, since 2017, when we started to process the houses, used, we basically went through four different iterations of

How do you process a lead and be able to buy and sell houses all over the country? Right? How do you retail houses all over the country? Right? And so at the end of the day, we went through four diff, it was the fourth iteration after two years, we failed the first three times of taking all of these leads. We ended up working out an agreement with Todd before we bought the site a year and a half earlier when I first met him to start generating leads from him. And then

We used that year and a half to figure out how to effectively process leads all over the country. And it was the fourth iteration that actually worked. And our model now is currently 60 % wholesale nationally and 60 to 70 % wholesale nationally and 20 to 30 % retailing houses all over the country.

Kristen Knapp (10:24)
Wow, and it seems like lead generation is just such a strength of your business. guys, you’re hundreds a day.

Branden Grimshaw (10:29)
It’s.

Yeah, hundreds a day, not necessarily from our own website. We have strategic relationships with some big lead generators that we have a revenue sharing model with. And so we work with them to be able to convert. Our own sites generate leads, but the bulk of our leads are actually from some strategic relationships that we work with.

Kristen Knapp (10:53)
That’s amazing. you guys buy and sell so many homes throughout 30 states. Tell us about just working in so many different markets and kind of the thought that has to go into working in different states.

Branden Grimshaw (11:07)
Yeah, I mean, one of the keys is that you still have to have a boots on the ground person. Because of technology that’s there now, we can get our acquisition team to where they’re very dialed in on, very close to within 10 % variance, 10 to 15 % variance on both the retail value of the asset and the renovation costs that are needed. But we still need to have, you still need to have a boots on the ground person. So in our space,

we actually have a bank on an REO listing agent that goes out to the property and does a BPO for us. And so they walk the property, they give us their opinion of what it’s worth, and then they submit that report. And we’re doing that just under a hundred times a month, you know, with agents around the country. And we’ve got a, you know, a team that coordinates that. anyway, so, and then the other key is to make sure that you’ve got a really good, you know, like we have a, like a five,

We have a weighted average approach to both the retail value of the asset and the renovation amounts that we’re going to be spending. And that weighted, it’s basically built into the system. it’s very, very close on what actually happens within the business. And so we lean on that weighted average valuation model in both the…

retail value of the asset and the renovation costs expected to go into the asset. And so we lean on that heavy and that’s auto built into the, it’s a program we built into the software platform.

Kristen Knapp (12:31)
Wow, so you have, I mean, sounds like you just have such an amazing team.

Branden Grimshaw (12:34)
We have a fantastic team. That’s the best part of the business is the people we get to work with.

Kristen Knapp (12:39)
And how do you, tell us some tips about how to foster a great team and how to do hiring. I imagine on a large scale, it’s just very difficult.

Branden Grimshaw (12:48)
Yeah, we’re not a huge team. mean, we have a team, think, if you count the management, we’re at almost just under 20 employees total. Not counting contractors and project managers and agents that we work with all over the country, but the internal team is around 20. And the key that we’ve found is we found most of our top talent through referrals and through

not, I wouldn’t say recruiting from, you know, competitors potentially even indirectly without actually doing it. They mean people, people come to us that know that we’re in the space and they say, Hey, I’m looking to make a move. And you know, we’ll, we’ll take that very slowly, obviously. But yeah, most of our, you know, honestly, the biggest way that we’ve recruited is God’s brought the right people in at the right timing. That’s, that’s honestly the number one.

You know, as people have come to the business at the right time when we needed them. And so I don’t have a great story of, you can recruit people through this channel of being able to hire. Haven’t had a great success in hiring from, you know, like a hundred resumes down to five, down to the interviews and hiring the right person. We’ve had, it’s been a lot of, has brought us the right people at the right time. And that.

Kristen Knapp (14:44)
Yeah.

Branden Grimshaw (14:45)
That’s really the credit I have to give because if you ask my team, how did everybody get here? It was through referrals from people that come and work with us. They refer their friends and that’s that in addition to people coming. So anyways, hopefully that answers it.

Kristen Knapp (14:58)
Yeah, mean success

breeds success where if you’re doing a great job and have employees that love working for you, it’s going to bring more employees in who want to work for you. And what is your perspective just generally on the market right now? I know there’s a lot of people who are very scared or reticent to enter. What would be your perspective on it?

Branden Grimshaw (15:03)
you

Yep, 100%.

Guard your marketing dollars, meaning deploy them in the highest, obviously the highest profit centers. There’s a lot of people that I’ve met over the years that are going out of business or have gone out of business and it’s because the marketing dollars kind of got away from a conversion standpoint. And also be cautious on the retail. If you’re in the fix and flip space,

you know, be cautious on your, you know, your, you know, retail value of the assets and also the renovation estimates that you’re getting on the individual assets that you’re projecting. Because those numbers, you know, obviously can be off, you know, very quickly. So just make sure you budget appropriately. And then also in certain states like the Sun Belt type states, you know, just make sure you budget for the reduction in the retail value of the asset.

over a six month hold. You can still buy during a declining market. You can still buy, renovate and sell during a declining market. You just have to budget, hey, I think it’s gonna go down 15 % in value or 10 % value over the next year. So you gotta factor in the 5 % or 7.5 % reduction in the asset value and buffering in a solid return on the capital.

Kristen Knapp (16:29)
Is there a specific geographical region or regions that you are really loving right now?

Branden Grimshaw (16:35)
Ohio, we’ve got an office in Palm Beach and an office in Cincinnati, Ohio. And we are, going in, like, I believe heavily in the Cincinnati market from a rental standpoint. So I am buying rental properties here in Cincinnati. We have a little bit over 70 houses, a little bit over 70 houses, about half of those in Palm Beach County, Florida, and half of those in Cincinnati.

Dayton, Ohio and so we really like the Ohio market. We like the Midwest Indiana, Ohio Yeah, and then and then Palm Beach obviously I spent a lot of time in Palm Beach You know, I bought collectively between the time in Palm Beach and what we do nationally I’ve done just right around 3300 transactions and I single-family home buy renovate and sell or buy and wholesale transactions

And I would say that right now the south and part of the west, you know, that’s where we’re seeing the biggest declines that, you know, that have even affected our own numbers, right? So, yeah.

Kristen Knapp (17:41)
Yeah, mean, it’s good to point out that there’s still opportunity in other areas of the country, even if your market is not necessarily popping off right now. I love that. And so what would be maybe something you’ve learned along the way, maybe a mistake that turned into a great lesson?

Branden Grimshaw (17:50)
Sure.

A mistake that turned into a great lesson.

trying to think of.

When we were transitioning from the buying, renovating and selling houses business in Palm Beach County, where we were buying the properties from the county auctions, I think, like I stayed in the flow of doing the due diligence. The team was there. We were compressing our margins, rate compressing our margins at the county auction.

down from 25 % to 22 % to 20 % 18 and we ended up getting down to the 15 % margin on the fix and flips bidding against the hedge funds in 2015, 2016. And I would have probably cut the cord a little bit earlier instead of trying to compete against the hedge funds and moved on a little bit faster. was a little bit of a transition that took

probably two to three years to get back in the flow of real transaction volume. But we ended up also building out the iBuyer type model internally, which did take some time. And so not to say that it did take time, but we’ve got a very effective model that’s in place now. But yeah, so that transition period may be switching the way we were buying houses. Faster would have been good, but again, I don’t really know if I would have, I just.

accidentally ran into Todd at a meeting, at a meeting in Orlando, a real estate investor meeting, which I rarely go to. So that was another God connection where I was sitting at the table with him, and he was interested in selling his site that took a year and a half to buy. anyways, yeah.

Kristen Knapp (19:31)
Yeah,

I think it’s a good point to be open to opportunities and open to talking with people around you because you never know what’s going to really affect your journey.

Branden Grimshaw (19:40)
Yeah, the other thing is firing the people you know need to be fired, like letting them go sooner than later. I would say I believe heavily in the people that have around me and the team that I have around me. when, when you know that it needs to happen, ripping the bandaid off and moving forward with removing somebody from the organization, I’ve, I’ve only found positives in removing people that needed to be removed and the people inside your organization.

are the ones that going to tell you who really your key leaders are going to be the ones that tell you who really shouldn’t be there in the first place, so like any longer. So listening to those individuals within your organization.

Kristen Knapp (20:16)
Right,

Higher, slow, fire, fast for sure. It makes a big difference in company culture too. You don’t want a bad seed to ruin it for everyone else. So you’ve built, I mean, such an impressive business. What’s next for you?

Branden Grimshaw (20:20)
Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

We are going to get, ⁓ going from, have a majority of our lead generation is national. So it’s across the entire United States. We’re at a total of around 250 to 300 leads a day. And we are going to continue to keep rolling with the national buying and fixing and selling business, the national wholesaling operation. But what we’re also going to be doing is we’re setting up the turnkey operation in Cincinnati and Dayton, Ohio.

So we have some turnkey investors that want to buy 100, 150 houses a year. So we’re going to be providing those assets to them and also the management structure for them as well. In addition, we’re going to be setting up strategic locations to where we do a drill down marketing campaign like a traditional operator would do.

And we do that in specific markets and get the transaction volume going four to five, houses a month in each location. Yeah, and those are the two main areas. We are also considering doing a licensing type business with the iBuyHomes brand where we pair together the iBuyHomes brand with software platform to run the individual’s business.

and some AI tools that were in the process of developing internally to be able to help with conversions. So that’s another opportunity that we are gonna be exploring. Yeah.

Kristen Knapp (21:56)
Amazing! Well, it sounds very exciting.

Where can people find you?

Branden Grimshaw (21:59)
⁓ They can find us right at ibuyhomes.com. If you’d like I put my personal number on there. They can connect with us directly through ibuyhomes.com.

Kristen Knapp (22:12)
Amazing. Well, thank

you so much for being here, Branden.

Branden Grimshaw (22:15)
Alright, thank you. Appreciate your time.

Kristen Knapp (22:17)
And thank you everyone for listening. I hope that you learned a lot and we’ll see you back next time. Bye.

Branden Grimshaw (22:21)
Alright,

take care, see ya.