How Roger Blankenship Made Money During the 2008 Housing Crash

Roger Blankenship (00:00)
There was a three-bedroom, two-bath, five-year-old house in Stockbridge, Georgia that was probably worth on a good day in that market, it was probably worth $125,000. John bought the house for $170. I kid you not. That was the opening bid. He bought it for $170. Still has it today as a rental house. And, you know, the next month I got a house for $5,000. That’s a $150,000 house all day long.

Michelle Kesil (01:57)
Hey everybody, welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil Today I’m joined by someone I’m looking forward to chatting with. Roger Blankenship of Flipping America, who’s also a best selling author of Flipping Houses in Ten Days. So really excited to have you here today, Roger.

Roger Blankenship (02:19)
Thank you. Glad to be here.

Michelle Kesil (02:22)
Great, so let’s dive in. First off, for those new to your world, can you share what your main focus is?

Roger Blankenship (02:31)
Well, my main focus these days is ⁓ sharing the wisdom with anyone who wants to listen. ⁓ I I got into investing when I was in my early forties and I stayed into it until my early sixties and you know, I’m slowing down and ⁓ basically stepped away from active investing and now focusing on publishing and teaching.

Michelle Kesil (03:00)
Awesome. And can you share a little bit about your background on investing and what you have created?

Roger Blankenship (03:09)
Sure. Well, the background is this. I ⁓ forty years ago, I completed my training to enter the ministry. And I worked in a variety of different ⁓ nonprofits for ⁓ 15 years and in church work and things like that. And ⁓ major life change happened in my 40s. I’ve been a traveling speaker for a while, and my marriage came to an end, and it was time for me to find something else to do. People ask me,

Why did you get into real estate investing? I tell them sheer desperation and a lack of communicable job skills. Had nothing else really to fall back on. I’d already bought a couple of rental properties, you know, just trying to think ahead to the future, but I hadn’t really thought about it in any systematic way. And now, confronted with the option of doing that or being a school teacher or a bus driver, I decided to go into real estate full time. And so that’s what I did. And I’m kind of guy that

You know, if ⁓ if I’m gonna do something, I’m not gonna do it by half measures, I’m gonna go all in. So I had some success in raising outside capital, being that I was basically paid a non profit person’s salary for many years. I didn’t have a lot of money of my own. And so I went out and, you know, connected with some people who did have some money and made them some money. They told their friends and ⁓ the next thing you know I’ve got

million and half dollars of capital to go down to the courthouse auction and buy pretty much anything I see that looks like a deal. And we had a good time and some years we bought and sold a hundred houses, especially during the crash years of 2008 to 2012. I know it was a difficult time, but that’s when I made most of the money that I’ve ever made. And ⁓ from that I I started writing and communicating about this and

I may have my my friends blame me for this, but I may have unfortunately attracted the attention of ⁓ the hedge funds. I g I had a piece published in Forbes that talked about the perfect real estate ⁓ opportunity in Atlanta, Georgia. And ⁓ I was proud of it. I was gonna use it to try to raise more money to buy more houses, but the you know, three months later, hedge funds showed up at the courthouse steps and never looked back and they made life difficult. Made us four

You think about how else are we gonna find deals? Because if the hedge fund wants one of the houses we’re interested in, they’ll outbid us by fifty thousand dollars if they want to. we we didn’t understand how they would possibly make money, and we found out later on that a lot of them didn’t make any money. But ⁓ that forced us to find other ways of putting deals together, to get creative, to learn creative deal structures, to branch out, to go where they weren’t and to buy what they wouldn’t.

and learn some new skills about you know the the contracting process and all of that none of none of it was really easy but all of it became a good thing because it gives me kind of a broad foundation for the teaching that I’m doing right

Michelle Kesil (06:24)
Yeah, amazing. And what do you feel have been some of the main keys that really allowed your business to grow and run successfully?

Roger Blankenship (07:21)
Well, you know, they say necessity is the mother of invention and difficulty has been one of the things. I I remember sitting in my ⁓ my real estate agent’s office on the south side of Atlanta on a June day in two thousand seven when ⁓ and we were kind of just watching the TV in his conference room, just shooting the breeze, really. I think we had just maybe finished the closing or something.

And the news came on that a major mortgage company had just shut down. And it looked like ⁓ two or three others were gonna shut down in the next few days. And over the next few weeks we started watching the mortgage companies fail, and then over the next few months we started watching the banks fail. And ⁓ I Michelle, you’re too young to remember this, I know, but we were watching the real estate market do something it had never done fall.

values crash, not just, you know, ebb and flow a little bit like they have always done, but take a dramatic dive. Now it wasn’t everywhere in the country, but it was everywhere where there was a a ⁓ relatively high percentage of what we affectionately refer to as liar loans. They were loans that allowed borrowers to buy without fully documenting their income. Stated income loans are what they were technically called. And Atlanta had a lot of those.

Which means we had a lot of foreclosures, which means the values plummeted in Clayton County, just south of Atlanta. We watched the values drop seventy percent over a period of six or eight months. And I had six houses I was flipping in Clayton County when all this started. And we could see we weren’t really prepared for it when it started happening, but we could see the trend. And so I unloaded those properties as quickly as I could to get back into cash.

While we tried to regroup. Now, that makes a difficult circumstance when you’re trying to make your living buying and selling houses, and you know that anything you buy is going to be worth less when you get ready to sell it. So we had to factor that into our thinking. And ⁓ fortunately, well, it turned out to be fortunately for us, banks started getting into a difficult p position on their own, and they started selling properties for what essentially was a short sale price.

at the courthouse option. They were auction. They were taking a loss at the courthouse steps. And there was nobody around with cash other than me and a couple of my friends. And so, you know, it was not unusual for us to buy a house for forty percent of what it was worth just a few months ago. And ⁓ it it got so crazy that there were really three guys.

My realtor who I’d trained in the business and a friend of ours who drove about ninety miles from Macon to come up to our particular auction. Never did really figure out why. But there were the three of us and no one else at the steps for months on end. And so we decided, you know, let’s not bid against each other. Let’s just be fair. We’ll take turns getting the best deal of the month at the opening bid. And then after that we’ll bid against each other. And so it was John’s turn one month and

There was a three-bedroom, two-bath, five-year-old house in Stockbridge, Georgia that was probably worth on a good day in that market, it was probably worth $125,000. John bought the house for $170. I kid you not. That was the opening bid. He bought it for $170. Still has it today as a rental house. And, you know, the next month I got a house for $5,000. That’s a $150,000 house all day long.

In that market,

I put a few things into it, fixed it up and sold it for ninety and felt like, you know, I’d had a good day, even though I sold it under the value. So these difficult times are one of the key things that drove our success. And maybe there’s a word of encouragement in there for your listeners. Look, if you’re going through a difficult time, just think of it as a key indicator of your future success. And the only way to do to get through it is just to keep on going and you’ll get through it. So difficulty is one

I think competition is another. We should never discount the importance of competition because the hedge funds brought us a lot of problems. They it life was not so easy anymore, but they also ⁓ forced us to learn some things that would probably have been good for us to know all along. So ⁓ difficulty, competition. ⁓ you know, I could say opportunity, but opportunity is there in every market and

Right now the market looks pretty tough. I’ve talked to a lot of people and ⁓ it it’s been difficult the last couple of years. I think it’s actually I’m forecasting that it’s gonna get better for investors because the market is getting a little not so great for home sellers, which means there are gonna be more properties on the market and more people who are getting anxious and sometimes a little distressed. So yeah, that’s what comes to my mind.

Michelle Kesil (13:15)
Amazing, thank you for sharing. And I know that you are an author. Can you tell us a little bit more about your book and what some of the main takeaways are from that?

Roger Blankenship (13:28)
Sure. ⁓ well the book’s called ⁓ Ho Flipping Houses in Ten Days. And I gave it that name not because you can realistically flip a house in ten days. I have done it, but that’s you can’t build a business on it. I named it that because the book’s ten chapters. And if you read one chapter a day, you can read the entire start to finish how to flip a house in ten days. Now ⁓ I published the book ⁓ I don’t know, several years ago.

And it is a an international number one bestseller on Amazon. But honestly, I think that was for like fifteen or twenty minutes on a Tuesday afternoon. I’m not sure how they measure all of that. It it’s it sold pretty well, but it was enough that I got that little banner that they put, you know, the little badge they put on the cover of the book that says international number one bestseller. That’s pretty cool. ⁓

I like to think it’s a good book and I haven’t had any negative reviews on it, so maybe it is. And you know, I had a lot of my friends read it and they wrote nice things for the cover ⁓ before it came out. One of the things that I’ve always been pretty good at is taking a concept. If I understand it, I can break it down and explain it where almost anyone can understand. And that’s what I tried to do in the book. ⁓ first you do this, then you do this. Don’t do the things that the gurus are saying. At least don’t do them first because that doesn’t make sense.

Here’s how you really do it from someone who has really done it. And I also include a bunch of checklists and things like that. And after I got finished writing the original manuscript, I thought, hmm, sort of reads like a textbook, even though I think it’s well written and it’s complete. So I decided to include a couple of stories of actual flips, and they appear in sidebars. And one of them is a story from Warm Springs, Georgia, a rural area, but it’s famous because that’s where President Roosevelt went down and sat in the warm springs.

for therapy that those of you may know something about that from history. And that the rehabilitation center and hospital that he went to is still there. ⁓ the other one was a flip in ⁓ Henry County, Georgia, just south of Atlanta, where ⁓ the people that lost the house in foreclosure ⁓ tried to delay my getting access to the house and they succeeded for several months by filing bankruptcy and other

various court things to kind of delay the process. So I tell those stories in the book and a few of my friends who are willing to be frank with me said they like the stories better than the rest of the book. But yeah, anyway, it’s informative and maybe with the stories a little bit entertaining.

Michelle Kesil (16:17)
Yeah, amazing. And what are you most focused on solving or scaling to next?

Roger Blankenship (17:05)
So it’s interesting that you should ask that because I I do have a couple of things I’m working on. I’ll I’ll kind of go in backwards order. Several years ago I published an ebook called Fantastic Beasts and ⁓ Fantastic Deals and Where to Find Them. It was when the Fantastic Beasts movie was out and real popular. And the book was well received, it got good reviews on Amazon and so forth, but it was time for an update. So I took some time over the last few weeks and thought about it.

updated it and ⁓ even changed the title and now it’s called Building a Deal Pipeline. Because the point is if you want to be in the real estate business, it’s not all about finding the next deal. It’s about building a pipeline so that deals come to you. And ⁓ part of those skills that I learned when things got difficult is how to go out and network and and work with wholesalers and then find people who were supplying ⁓ quantities of houses through spreadsheets. We called them tapes back in the day.

But for a while there I had between ten and fifteen thousand ⁓ opportunities in my inbox every single week. And so when I wrote the book, it was talking about how to do that. And so now that I’ve rewritten it, it’s a little bit more comprehensive. It’s got some helpful charts and graphs, and I’m pretty excited about it. But the reason I wanted to tell you about this, Michelle, is

⁓ I am looking for some advanced readers. The manuscript is done, but before I publish it, I would like to get fifteen or twenty people to read it, comment on it, and you know, tell me how I can strengthen it. So if anybody listening to this wants to ⁓ get a a free advanced copy of the book, I’ll send it to them as a PDF. all they have to do is just drop me a line, Roger at flippingamerica.net, and just say, I’d like the pipeline book. Then I’ll I’ll know and I will personally send it to you and we’ll interact after that.

The other thing that I’m working on is ⁓ I started a newsletter last year and I actually started writing it a couple years ago, but we officially launched in September of 25. It’s called Real Estate Investing Quick Tips. My idea then, and one of the things that ⁓ has been a theme on the Flipping America show, the podcast I’ve been doing since 2019, is I think that

Most of these hotel room gurus, maybe all of them, they’re just a ripoff. most of it is canned information that you can probably find. Now you there’s a lot of free information out on the internet about how to invest in real estate and so forth. The problem there is you don’t really know who to believe, and some of it is not only wrong, some of the things that people suggest that you do are illegal. And so you need to be careful about that, but also you need to put things in kind of an order. Well, being an educator

that’s what I’ve done. I just don’t think it’s worth fifty thousand dollars. I don’t it’s not that hard. I even have an illustration, one of my favorites, I had AI draw it up for me, a group of surgeons around an operating table saying, ⁓ and they’re operating on a rocket. It’s, you know, real estate investing is not rocket surgery. It’s it’s not that complicated and you shouldn’t have to spend fifty thousand dollars to learn this. So I have just sort of it’s been a part of the person that I am.

for a long time just to give away information. And so I started giving it away in this free newsletter, Real Estate Investing Quick Tips. It’s a daily two minute read on some aspect of real estate investing. And it’s completely free. It’s always been free. It always will be free. And anyone can get it just by going to flippingamerica.net slash quick tips. And you know, it’s interesting we launched with family and friends and then watched it start growing.

And in September we had, you know, around twenty five hundred subscribers. And today we’re just about to cross sixty thousand subscribers, you know, in just f five or six months. So ⁓ it’s it’s been a lot of fun to write. And ⁓ anyway, th so what I’m what I’m working on are things that I intend to give away.

Michelle Kesil (21:23)
Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing all of that. And before we begin to wrap up here, if someone wants to reach out, connect, and learn more, where can people stay up to date and connect with you?

Roger Blankenship (21:34)
sure. Just go to flippingamerica.net and you can always if we answer questions, ⁓ we answer them on the podcast and for the podcast. So if you have a question about real estate or real estate investing, just send it to questions at flippingamerica.net and we will grab that. Someone on the team will answer it. It may be me. and if if it’s a question that will teach others, we’ll use it on the flipping America show. But flippingamerica.net is the place to find us.

Michelle Kesil (22:05)
Perfect. Well, appreciate your time and your story. Thank you for being here.

Roger Blankenship (22:10)
Thank you for having me.

Michelle Kesil (22:13)
Course. And for those tuning in, if you got value, make sure you’ve subscribed. We have more conversations with operators like Roger who are building real businesses. And we’ll see you on the next episode.