How Malhar Bhagat Went From Less Than $100 to a Multimillion-Dollar Real Estate Business

Malhar Bhagat (00:00)
I think that belief is really like stop focusing on what you don’t have, focus on what you do have. And so I often say to my ⁓ team, is you can never control when the seller is ready to sell their house. What you can control is how often you’re in front of them. And so if you build solid follow-up systems in place, you can control that.

Guess what? If you’ve I remember one lead, I’ll never forget this. A few years ago, there was this lead where we started marketing to them in 2018. We ended up buying the deal in 2021. And I said to our team, I was like, how did we buy this deal? Like, I I don’t even know where it came from. They’re like, yeah, this was part of our old marketing. So I went into our CRM. We followed up with this seller 172 times. Wow. 172 times because we kept track of it.

Meghan Escobar (02:26)
Welcome back to another episode of Real Estate Pros Podcast. I am your host, Meghan Escobar. And one of my favorite parts about hosting this show is getting the opportunity to sit down with incredible entrepreneurs and operators and learn learn about their business and what they’ve built and who the person is behind that. Because at the end of the day, every business has a story. Every entrepreneur has a turning point that shaped how they think.

how they lead and how they grow. So today we’re going to be diving into exactly that. Super excited to welcome Malhar Bhagat to the show. Thank you so much for being here. And I’d love, yes. I’d love to start with for somebody meeting you for the first time, who are you?

Malhar Bhagat (03:14)
Yeah, so my name’s Malhar Bhagat. ⁓ first and foremost, I am a husband, father, son. and ⁓ I love my family. ⁓ and ⁓ I love real estate. real estate ⁓ investing primarily has literally changed my life. ⁓ 20 years ago I was broke, no joke. started with ⁓ hundred dollars and what I like to call a credit card and a dream.

less than a hundred dollars. And now I have multiple businesses that are operating at a multi-million dollar level and ⁓ a pretty robust portfolio. I have my hands in all different types of residential real estate investment strategies, including

You know, we buy and hold, fix and flip, we build new construction, we have a lending company, ⁓ short term rentals, long term rentals. ⁓ I’m a licensed agent, my wife’s a licensed general contractor. So we run the gamut all vertically integrated and we love what we do. We love how real estate has changed both mine and my wife’s life and that of our family. So it that’s in a nutshell what I am who I am.

Meghan Escobar (04:23)
It definitely broke that down in a way that I think a lot of people can resonate with. How did you get into this industry?

Malhar Bhagat (04:30)
⁓ so funny enough, I got into this industry. often sometimes how a lot of folks may or may not get into it. I would say, you know, I went to this free three-day seminar where they’re gonna teach you all about real estate investing. ⁓ and so when you’re new to the industry and you see these VIP tickets that come through, right?

⁓ you don’t know it’s gonna be a sales spit for three days, but you go, right? And ⁓ I went there, ⁓ opened up a whole bunch of credit cards that weekend and across five different credit cards spent forty thousand dollars ⁓ that I did not have ⁓ on credit cards to learn about investing in the real estate business.

Meghan Escobar (05:11)
⁓ Was there anything specific that drew you to this industry specifically versus any other business out there?

Malhar Bhagat (05:17)
Yeah, so ⁓ hist history wise, like, you know, I grew up ⁓ w without a house. you know, I I lived in an apartment for

My my entire childhood and even growing up going to college, my parents continue to live in a house. I mean ⁓ an apartment. ⁓ and so this desire of having a house and watching others, you know, kind of level up, buy houses or other families ⁓ move out of that apartment complex and us not being able to do that made this like deep desire to be like, Man, I wanna own houses, you know, I wanna own a house, just one house, you know, ⁓ and kind of live the American dream. And so

you know, somewhere along the path, I must have signed up for some newsletter somewhere about real estate investing. And then, you know, now you’re always on the list. And that’s how I got these VIP tickets to this free three day seminar. And so began that journey.

Meghan Escobar (06:09)
Wow. If you could take us back to where that that journey really began for you, like after that seminar, you know, what was what was life like for you before?

Malhar Bhagat (07:11)
Yeah. Before this business, well, I was ⁓ you know, I I joined my dad in his business. that was around 2005. and we didn’t have much. Yeah, my dad had a business, but ⁓ and I love him to death, but at the end of the day, he had a well-paid ⁓ or it wasn’t that well paid, honestly. ⁓ he had a job, he had created a job for himself, you know, he was self-employed, one man banned.

for a a very long time. And so when I got in, ⁓ I was excited. So he kind of let loose of the reins. But we were in an industry where we sold on credit, expecting people to pay us. They stopped paying us. And so I made a lot of decisions at that time that cost us our entire business, my my family’s business. So I was in a very deep depressed state, feeling responsible for what I had kind of caused from

my family and honestly was kinda like moping around the house for like three or four months and my mom was like, Look, like there’s these tickets for this real estate event. You’ve always been into it. Like go, right? ⁓ and so I went to it and went three days in a row. I had to you know, ⁓ ask a friend of mine that lived in New York City, ⁓ if I could you know, s stay on their couch for three nights ’cause I couldn’t afford to like

Stay there, right? and and I would go to the seminar every day and then I didn’t ask anyone’s permission, actually. I didn’t tell anyone. I just opened up the credit cards and I I ⁓ swiped them all. ⁓ because I couldn’t swipe one because it cost forty thousand. So I had to swipe it across multiple credit cards. Yeah. And you know, the big thing for that at at that moment ⁓ was I made a decision in my head. It was succeed or die.

Right. Whatever it takes, burn the boats. Like there’s no turning back. I just I put something big. ⁓ I bet on myself, you know. And huge. Yeah. And and ⁓ funny little story on Monday is when I told my father. ⁓ and so he’s like, Let me see the receipt. And you know, all these programs on the back, they have this little three day rite of rescission. And he’s like, he read that and he’s like, Mahler, you should return this. And I was like, No, Dad, this is not about you.

This is about me. He’s like, What if you can’t make the money to pay this? Like, like it’s gonna ruin your credit, all that. I was like, Again, this is not about you. This is about me. I need to regain the confidence in who I am as a person to know that I can do something and not destroy something. I can create something, you know. ⁓

Meghan Escobar (09:46)
So you knew that you were the power in that in that time. I love that. And so Yeah.

What or when did things start to change for you?

Malhar Bhagat (09:56)
I think, you know, for me when I started YouTube and Facebook and Instagram wasn’t huge. Although it was starting out, there weren’t creators all over the place, you know, where you know, nowadays in twenty twenty-six you can hop on YouTube and learn what wholesaling is, fix and flip is, transactional funding, all the things that you might need to know about real estate within

a few hours of your time, a weekend you can become familiar with what real estate investing is and probably download five contracts, right? ⁓ you couldn’t do that back then, right? ⁓ and so it took me a long time to feel like I was making progress. And the interesting thing is I invested in 2008, made a little bit of money, but I I put the cart before the horse. I raised a little bit of private capital and then I went and bought rentals with it.

And then I realized I was getting ⁓ probably a grand total of about a thousand dollars net per month. And I was like, I can’t live off of this, this is not gonna make sense. So I had to kind of unwind that, sell off some rentals, get back to you know, ground zero, realize that fix and flip was the way to go, and then started kind of generating some income. So it actually took me about three and a half to four years before I made my first six figures in the business. And so during that three and a half and four years,

I had to keep paying this forty thousand dollar bill. And then two years later, actually, I thought the gap wasn’t ⁓ the wrong strategy. I thought the gap was less education. So I invested in another program at that time for an additional twenty thousand dollars or fifteen thousand dollars. Yeah, exactly. But what I was doing was I was robbing Peter to pay Paul. Like I would borrow from Visa to pay the MasterCard bill and then I’d borrow from Discover to pay the

Meghan Escobar (11:33)
So roll it on the credit.

Malhar Bhagat (11:44)
Visa bill and so on and so forth. ⁓ literally paying a game of ⁓ you know, like the the cup game that you see out there. Yeah. Yeah. But it that’s kind of when I I I realized I was like, okay, that first year, 2011 is when I made my first six figures. I was like, whoa, there’s something real here. Right. And that’s when that’s what pushed me to go harder at it.

Meghan Escobar (11:53)
Wow.

Was there anything specific that happened that gave you that aha moment or you know, like what were you feeling at that time?

Malhar Bhagat (12:50)
Yeah, that’s a great question. ⁓ when you grow up ⁓ with not a lot of money, I find that a lot of people in the family are like, We can’t buy that. We gotta cut our expenses. We can’t afford this, we can’t afford that, right? And like your mind is trained and programmed to be like, I can’t afford this, I can’t afford that. And so what was one of the first things I cut?

⁓ not so intelligently marketing. because I was like, marketing is not producing a ⁓ an immediate return on investment, so I need to cut that, right? And so the one of the biggest shifts that happened to me right around 2011 when I made that first six figures, I had this shift in my mind, which was I need to stop playing defense and I need to play more offense. And I use this example. The most winningest ⁓

player in the NFL is not a defensive person. It’s an offensive person. It’s Tom Brady. And Tom Brady is one of the highest scorers that’s ever played the game. And so it’s like offense wins games. And so I stopped looking at how much am I spending and I started saying to myself, how much am I making? And so as soon as I started doing that, literally it was a light bulb moment in my mind.

I was like, forget how much I’m spending. Let’s start making more money. And I started challenging myself. ⁓ I made 30,000 on this deal. Can I make 40? Can I make 50? Can I make 70? Can I do a hundred thousand dollar deal? Can I do a hundred and fifty thousand dollar deal? And, you know, I’m a big believer in law of attraction, manifestation. And it’s like if you believe it and you can see it, you can experience it. And I began to believe that I can see bigger and bigger and better deals over and over.

And that’s what started happening for me over and over.

Meghan Escobar (14:42)
When that belief changed, like I guess I’m curious to know like what belief changed because we talked about the connection of the mindset and how you grew up. So a little bit about that.

Malhar Bhagat (14:51)
Yeah. Yeah,

I think that belief is really like stop focusing on what you don’t have, focus on what you do have. And so I often say to my ⁓ team, is you can never control when the seller is ready to sell their house. What you can control is how often you’re in front of them. And so if you build solid follow-up systems in place, you can control that.

Guess what? If you’ve I remember one lead, I’ll never forget this. A few years ago, there was this lead where we started marketing to them in 2018. We ended up buying the deal in 2021. And I said to our team, I was like, how did we buy this deal? Like, I I don’t even know where it came from. They’re like, yeah, this was part of our old marketing. So I went into our CRM. We followed up with this seller 172 times. Wow. 172 times because we kept track of it.

Now, how many times did anyone on our team get on the phone or actually get an interface with him? Only 20 times. But we were in front of this seller 172 times. I looked at our initial offer. The price we bought it for in 2021 was the same as our initial offer. What changed is not the seller, not the buyer, the market change. The market increased in value where ⁓ we could buy it at the price that he was suggesting at that time.

And and the only reason we bought it is because we were in front of that seller all for three years, right? And we did not quit on this leap.

Meghan Escobar (16:22)
And imagine though, right? Like that’s such a solid piece of advice that I think our listeners can take from is the power of the follow-up because there’s so many times that people will just give up after a certain amount of no’s, right? Like it it just imagined that, right? It’s that kind of goes back to that the concept of three feet to gold, right? So if you guys just stopped following up, there would have been another person that would have reached out to her at the perfect timing and boom, right?

Malhar Bhagat (16:48)
Gotten it. Yep. Yeah. And that that you know, I I keep that deal in my mind because it serves as a good example. That deal I think we made like sixty-five thousand dollars. It went fifty grand over list, you know. I actually I think we made like closer to eighty thousand because I wouldn’t have done a deal where we make fifteen grand. ⁓ so ⁓ yeah, ⁓ yeah, yeah, it was a solid deal, but but that’s what I’m saying. It’s like okay

Meghan Escobar (17:10)
Home run.

Malhar Bhagat (17:15)
Hundred and seventy two times to follow up, a text message or a a phone call made by a virtual assistant, that VA did not cost me eighty thousand dollars over that three year period. You know what I mean?

Meghan Escobar (17:27)
Yeah, exactly. And what do you feel like it is that makes your company different than any competitor out there?

Malhar Bhagat (18:14)
I think where we kind of really excel is we’ve become so vertically integrated. I really focused, and I don’t think anyone should do this until they become a master of one thing first. ⁓ I really focused, we became really freaking good at fixing and flipping properties. ⁓ once we did that, I began to realize problems that were coming up, which I was able to reframe as opportunities.

And so what we do really good is we’ve learned how to squeeze the most juice out of any deal by becoming vertically integrated. So what do I mean? On most deals, we make money four times, most residential fix and flip deals. We’re often in 99% of the cases, we’re the lender, we’re the owner, because we’re the investor, we’re the agent, we are also the GC.

So we’re making money four times on the same deal, where a fix and flip deal, which could have made us 30 or 40 grand, now might make us 65 or 70,000. So I think it’s it’s unique because the cool part is when you take that entire vertical integration, yeah, I can maximize the opportunity on one deal or maximize the profit on one deal.

But when other types of opportunities show up, like this morning, I just had a conversation with someone that wanted to bring us in as a partner. And we were like, what value are you going to add? And I don’t say this in a mean way. It’s just like, okay, if you want to wholesale the deal, wholesale it to me. But I don’t really need you involved. Rather than doing that, it’s like, look, maybe I can reframe it. Why don’t you do the deal? I’ll be your lender. You know what I mean? So it’s like, okay, maybe this deal didn’t make the most sense for me because it didn’t have as much of a margin or spread that I might want, but can I still at least

Get my hand to dip into there a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Meghan Escobar (20:01)
work.

Cool. Well, it sounds like you’re trying to figure out different ways to, you know, solve, solve the problem for customers or potential ⁓ collaborations. So what what challenge do you feel like you are solving for your customers right now?

Malhar Bhagat (20:16)
⁓ I think really where I try to ⁓ excel is certainty. ⁓ I don’t win deals because I’m the highest paying person. I don’t want to be the highest paying person. If I’m getting into multiple offers on a wholesale deal, I’m probably going to lose. I’m okay with that, right? But here’s what happens. What I said earlier. As long as my follow-up game is robust, a lot of deals come back to me because a lot of deals fall out.

A lot of buyers are not able to close. And so when a wholesaler or an agent is about to lose a contract or a listing or something like that, they might say, All right, well, you know, I’m I’m going to ⁓ Malhar because he’s he’s gonna give me a price and he’s gonna show up at the closing table. You know, ever that’s what I try to leverage. When I compete on a deal, I will go in no DD, right? Which is standard for most experienced flippers, right? No DD.

I’m willing to put down five, ten, fifteen, twenty thousand dollars as earnest money non-refundable. Why? Because I know I’ve already evaluated the deal. I’m going to buy this. I’m going to close on it. And having the back end lending company is extremely helpful because I already know I got the capital ready to go, lined up, to be able to close on the deal. So my my talk track with most people is look, I I the first sentence I say to new people that I meet.

I’m not going to pay you the most. If you want the most, go to the market, go to someone else, go kick some tires, find some person who’s, you know, starting out or maybe using a combination of hard money and gap funder and uncle’s money and blah, blah, blah. And hopefully it comes together. But many times I see it not come together. So if you want certainty, you come to me, let’s get the deal done. You can start marketing and worry about the next deal.

Meghan Escobar (22:08)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. What do you think is or or I guess ⁓ see, how do I want to ask this? How has your leadership evolved over the years?

Malhar Bhagat (22:17)
I think ⁓ one of the big things you do when you have had the type of experience I have growing up is you tend to want your hands and eyes on everything. I I think that many CEOs and and business owners are often like this, which is control freaks, right? and I think that I have

been that way for a long, long time. And over the last probably s five, six, seven years, I’ve really had to exercise the muscle of trust and trusting other people. In certain areas, I’ve been really great at doing that. ⁓ working with my team to help create processes that they can follow to know you know, that they’re successful at a task. You know, something I learned a a long time ago was

You don’t just teach someone how to do something. You teach them what success looks like when they have completed a task so that they can know if they did it right or wrong. And when they do that, now you can finally let go because now they know what success looks like. If you know the task they were doing matches what a success looks like, then it’s like, okay, now I can f successfully hand it off. There are two ways to outsource. Outsource through abdication or outsource through delegation. And when

I’ve I have been ⁓ you know victim to or not victim, but I don’t like that word at all. But I I have ⁓ s ⁓ found myself sometimes outsourcing through abdication. And then they’re I’m just like, they didn’t know what they’re doing and they screwed this up. But whose fault really is it? I could point the finger because I’m the boss, or I can point the finger over here and be like, You didn’t do it right.

So take it back on your plate, fix it, show them what actually success looks like so that they can be successful and you don’t ever have to do this task ever again.

Meghan Escobar (24:13)
That’s really powerful. And I think it’s a an incredible way to look at ⁓ as the delegating part, right? It’s like, am I delegating this properly to make sure that they know how to make it work the right way? Right. Mm-hmm. Potentially. Absolutely. Yeah. So I know that a lot of our listeners, they are either

Malhar Bhagat (24:29)
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. 100%.

Meghan Escobar (24:36)
very early on in their journey of entrepreneurship and stepping into the real estate industry on on all different levels, you know, from the builder to the investor to the agent to to all levels, right? Or they’ve been in the game for a while and they’re looking for different ways to level up. And I think that they would benefit from hearing this. Like when it comes to building the right relationships, Malhar, ⁓ and growing your network, I mean, what’s made the biggest difference for you?

Malhar Bhagat (25:00)
I think for me the most important thing is do what you say you’re gonna do. Right. ⁓ I and I can think of a whole bunch of platitudes that I kind of follow myself. ⁓ and I’ll I’ll share a few of them. And yeah, they’re platitudes, but I actually follow through on them. One of them big one of the biggest ones is underpromise over deliver. Oftentimes when I talk to someone, they’re like, All right, cool, we might we can do this deal with you.

How fast can you close? I’ll tell them usually 14 to 21 days, right? And then usually I’ll close in 10, right? And so it’s like set yourself up for success. That’s really important. Don’t underpromise. I mean, I’m sorry, don’t under ⁓ overpromise and underdeliver, right? Underpromise, over-deliver every single time. And if you do that,

over and over and over again over 20 years, which is kind of almost as long as how long I’ve been doing this, guess what happens? All of a sudden, I I don’t have to look for deals. Like the deals show up, right? The deals show up and I just get an opportunity to evaluate, shoot into my team, or if I’m evaluating them myself because I’m a deal junkie, ⁓ you know that’s my that’s my special

⁓ so I love I love looking at deals, ⁓ evaluating them, and ⁓ pursuing them, you know, seeing if an idea that I had in my mind plays out is always fun to see over a three, six, nine, twelve month period, depending on the type of deal it is. ⁓ so so yeah.

Meghan Escobar (26:38)
Yeah. That’s that’s some really powerful information. Underpromise, over deliver. Yeah. And create those trusting relationships that somebody knows that they’re doing work with you, they can count on you to show up. Yeah. 100%. Do what you ⁓ say what you do what you say.

Malhar Bhagat (26:54)
Say,

do what you say you will. Yeah. And then and and that’s that touches on what I said earlier about certainty, right? Creating that certainty. It’s like I want this to be the sentence around ⁓ my market, Metro Atlanta. Malhar is a closer, right? Malhar closes. Like when you say closer, Malhar should be part of that sentence, right? And guess what? If if I close with one investor or another.

They lead me to other deals. I just closed a deal ⁓ few weeks ago, like two or three weeks ago, based off of a relationship from some ⁓ someone I know in my market. I’ve done maybe one or two deals with him, but I’ve known him for years. He gave my name to someone else that I don’t know, randomly get a text. I ended up buying this deal. This deal’s gonna make us over $450,000 on a new construction, right? And it’s because

I created that trust with this one person and that trust exactly that trust transferred to another because this guy said, Well, if you know so and so, I trust you already.

Meghan Escobar (28:00)
Yeah. And that’s something that you just can’t fake. And you know, certainty is is a really powerful word, especially in today’s world, because there’s so much uncertainty floating around. And with AI, we don’t know what’s real sometimes and what isn’t. And so one thing that we cannot fake is relationships, and that is everything in this space. And so before we wrap up, if someone

listening in wanted to reach out to you, Malhar, and connect with you and learn from you or collaborate or close a deal with you, yeah. What would be the best way for them to reach you? ⁓

Malhar Bhagat (28:34)
Usually I I say hit me up on Facebook or Instagram. ⁓ you know, full disclosure, I’m not the best at social media, and that’s that’s something I’ll be working on and continue to work on that muscle. ⁓ but look, my business ⁓ is is doing well, right? And and I’m so grateful for that. ⁓ but reach out to me on Instagram or social media. ⁓ it’s Malhar B Real, M-A-L-H-A-R, the letter B.

R E A L and that’s a kind of a play on something that I really believe in, which is who am I? I want to be my authentic self. And so Malhar B Real, obviously play on my name, which is Malhar Bhagat, right with the B. But it’s like, and it’s real estate, and I was like, this is a great handle. So ⁓ that’s what I yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can find me on Facebook, Malhar Bhagat look me up, or on Instagram, Malhar B Real.

Meghan Escobar (29:22)
It all the lines.

Malhar Bhagat (29:30)
Shoot me a DM and we can chat.

Meghan Escobar (29:32)
Perfect. Well, listen, I appreciate your time, your story, and more importantly, your perspective on the way that you do business and the way that you position yourself as a leader. And we need more people in this space who are doing things the right way, who are really showing up as their authentic selves and creating those certainty ⁓ situations and relationships. So thank you again.

For being here. And for those of you that are tuning in, if you did get any value from this conversation, be sure to hit subscribe. We have more conversations with operators, just like Malhar here, who are out here building real businesses, real relationships in real time. So we’ll see you on the next episode.