How to Build a Real House Flipping Business Instead of Just Flipping Houses | Matt Lavinder

Matt Lavinder (00:00)
I really think you should think about it in terms of like who you want to be, what you want to do. Like if you really enjoy your career and that’s where your meaning is and you want to supplement your income, keep it low risk and have something on the side, you probably don’t need a franchise system to do one two a year. You can do that with your home equity or…

friends and family, friends and family money, a local bank. Like you can do that. ⁓ But if that’s not what you want to be doing for your career, like if you want to be a full-time real estate investor, then you have to be a professional.

Cody Crabb (02:19)
Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast. am Cody Crabb with Investor Fuel. Today I’m joined by Matt Lavinder, owner of New Again Houses, running a nationwide fix and flip franchise model, backed by their own capital fund and systems across 50 plus markets. I’m excited to get into this one. Matt, thanks so much for joining us today.

Matt Lavinder (02:37)
Yeah, man, glad to be here.

Cody Crabb (02:39)
So why don’t you tell us a little bit about your origin story. How did you ⁓ wind up getting involved in the real estate industry and then also kind of just where you are today?

Matt Lavinder (02:50)
Yeah, it’s been a winding path like a lot of entrepreneurs, but my past life, one of my past

was a university soccer coach. And that was my identity. Coaching is in my DNA. I did that for 12 years. while I was…

Cody Crabb (03:01)
Wow.

You know, I don’t know what I mean by this,

but you sound like a university soccer coach. Like the voice, you got the voice of a university soccer coach.

Matt Lavinder (03:14)
Yeah,

sometimes it’s down there. If I need to dig for a certain voice, it’s in there somewhere. ⁓

Cody Crabb (03:21)
Yeah, so after

that what happened?

Matt Lavinder (03:27)
Well, while I was doing that, did what a lot of people do is I was always really interested in real estate. ⁓ And so my wife and I would flip houses. We would hold some as rentals. We would flip them. We would do it on a small scale on the side. it just started growing and I’m a systems guy. So we really started building systems to scale and eventually transitioned out of that career and did this full

time and I remember how difficult it was to take that leap from going you know doing it on the side to giving up your giving up your w2 your identity and jumping in jumping in full time and so I know how hard that was and it was a really lonely kind of ⁓

lonely kind of journey because nobody else is, you don’t have a circle of people that you can go through that with. So anyway, ⁓ we started flipping at scale locally and ⁓ that ultimately became ⁓ a franchise system.

Cody Crabb (04:35)
Wow, so tell us a little bit about that system. What is it that kind of ⁓ people are… ⁓

What made that something that was not only repeatable, but that you were like, is so repeatable, we can distribute this kind of thing?

Matt Lavinder (04:51)
Yeah, yeah,

it was a learning process, man. Like, I don’t think anybody truly understands what it’s

the complexity and difficulty of franchising a business until you go through it. Like, I think everybody that starts is incredibly naive about how difficult it is because you accumulate this expertise in your own mind by doing your thing. And in my case, it was flipping houses here locally and we were

doing, I don’t know, the time probably 15 to 20 full flips a year. You get that expertise and then you think that you can, it’s just an extension, franchising is just an extension of that and you do more of it in more locations and that’s just not the case because franchising is a completely different business. ⁓ And so ⁓ it happens to be flipping houses but the franchise business is completely different. what led to that is we got some

capital investors behind our projects and we honestly were raising, we’re returning really good returns and we raised, we had more capital available than we could reasonably ⁓ invest here in our small market in East Tennessee. And so, franchising is like, well, how do we deploy more capital and really leverage these systems that I’ve built? So, franchising made sense. And so, we jumped in in

2015 that’s I started focusing on building the franchise system and I had some people here to continue with our flips and I jumped in and that’s where I’ve been that’s where I’ve been for the past for the past ten years is building that building that system

Cody Crabb (07:25)
Wow, okay, so that’s, I find this really interesting because a lot of times, you know, investors find their secret and then they kind of hold onto it. They keep it close to the vest. They’re like, no, this is my way, this is my path. And every once in a while you find someone who kind of goes, well, maybe it’s my path, but I can find a way to, you know, kind of make that part of my identity and my business. And I think that’s definitely something you don’t see as often, I think.

Matt Lavinder (07:48)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, you know, there’s so many different ways to create opportunities in real estate. And I think it’s important to really kind of know yourself and match the niche that you choose, like the lane that you choose that actually fits who you are. And for me, don’t know that I sat down and really thought through that, but looking back, like I talk about the coach DNA,

that never left. And franchising is a really great fit for that skill set. And I didn’t know it when I started, but franchising is a coaching business. And I think personally, you have to get as much satisfaction seeing other people on your team win as you get satisfaction for winning yourself. And that’s the definition of

coach, right? Like not everybody gets that satisfaction. ⁓ But that’s the business in franchising. It really is a coaching business.

Cody Crabb (08:55)
See you.

Yeah, I think, and you mentioned that that is a big part of, have dedicated coaches as well, right?

Matt Lavinder (09:15)
Yeah, yeah, so, you know, I didn’t know any of this when we started. Like, I honestly thought that it was just gonna be an extension of what we did here. And we were, you if we’re doing 30 here, well, why not be able to ⁓ extend it to other locations. But the more you get into it, franchising is not about you doing the thing that you used to do. It’s about…

empowering strangers to do what you used to do. so, you know, what is involved in that, there’s got to be a lot of technology to scale that. And so we’re heavily invested in technology to be able to scale that. ⁓ But but also coaching resources. So

we’ve got dedicated business full time business coaches, a team of three full time business coaches, and all they do is try to help empower

our franchise owners to do 12 flips a year or more.

Cody Crabb (10:51)
Yeah, that’s really cool that you kind of recognize the value of that. I mean, you’re literally a coach. your background is literally coaching. You see the value in that. I think… ⁓

Matt Lavinder (10:58)
Yeah.

You know what’s funny

though is I didn’t, when I first started, didn’t equate the two. Like didn’t equate franchising with coaching. I learned that.

a few years in. ⁓ And a lot of franchises don’t do that. Like they’re very reactive. they, their support is like a hotline button. You have a problem, you call, somebody picks up the phone. And so a few years in, we just really, we really pivoted and leaned, leaned into the, into the proactive coaching model. And it’s, it’s, I don’t what our system is based on now.

Cody Crabb (11:37)
Yeah, so a question I’d have for you is, if somebody is ⁓ coming into your system, let’s say they join up with you and they’re excited and things, where do you start to see cracks form? Where do you start to see it where it’s not really gonna work out? What are the early signs?

Matt Lavinder (11:51)
Mmm.

Yeah, no,

that’s a really, really good question.

because you can do, like a lot of people will do one or two flips a year, right? And it’s kind of like the mom and pop model, and that’s what your capital allows, that’s what your time allows, is to do one or two. And those, you don’t necessarily see those cracks, because you can do one or two without really being, let’s say, a professional. Like you can do that as an amateur, and you can use spreadsheets,

Cody Crabb (12:28)
Totally. Yeah.

Matt Lavinder (12:31)
and you can use systems, know, a lot of things will work with one or two. The problem with doing one or two is it’s really hard to turn that into a business. And so you have to do volume in order to turn it into a real business unless you just want to go patch the cracks with your own hammer and paintbrush every weekend, right? And so to do volume though requires you to do a lot of different

Cody Crabb (12:53)
Yeah.

Matt Lavinder (13:01)
things at a high level. And so for us, we’ve got people doing more than 20 projects a year. But for us, success is 12 projects a year. And the reason for 12 is because it gives you enough volume to create competitive advantages and actually have a business. But it’s not so much that you can’t still have a great quality of life. Like you can manage a project a month and still have a great quality of

Cody Crabb (13:13)
Hmm.

Matt Lavinder (13:31)
So 12 is like our is our target and ⁓ But to do 12 like you have to have you have to be performing at a high level in lead generation analysis And construction like we’re doing full-fledged Flips we’re not wholesaling. We’re actually adding value to these properties and so ⁓ to do all those to do all that you have each one of those things has to be operating at a high level and

And you have to have the capital to be able to support that. And so where cracks emerge for people is you have to do those four things at the same time. And we provide a lot of that, but you’ll see people get inventory, and so they’ll get a few projects going, and then their focus goes to projects. And they’ll take their foot off the gas on acquisitions.

Cody Crabb (14:05)
Yeah.

Matt Lavinder (14:27)
but to build a scalable business like this, like you have to do more than one thing at a time. Like you have to execute your construction projects, you have to manage those projects, and you also have to keep your foot on the grass gas on the acquisitions. And that’s not easy to do. Yeah.

Cody Crabb (14:47)
Let’s go ahead

Yeah, certainly. Well, and this

is probably a good ⁓ change. What I was about to ask is a good switch for this. So ⁓ at what point do you think it starts making sense to think of yourself more of the systems person and instead of the like boots on the ground, like you said, painting cracks and things like when do you start thinking about that kind of stuff?

Matt Lavinder (15:11)
you

really think you should think about it in terms of like who you want to be, what you want to do. Like if you really enjoy your career and that’s where your meaning is and you want to supplement your income, keep it low risk and have something on the side, you probably don’t need a franchise system to do one two a year. You can do that with your home equity or…

friends and family, friends and family money, a local bank. Like you can do that. ⁓ But if that’s not what you want to be doing for your career, like if you want to be a full-time real estate investor, then you have to be a professional.

and like it’s different than doing one or two at a time. And so to be a professional, like you have to really get good at these things. And that means like you either get good at them yourself and that steep learning curve or ⁓ a franchise model is an option. ⁓ But it’s too, I think it’s two different paths. we talk, we say like, we don’t flip houses. We’re trying to build a

business that flips houses. And that’s… yeah.

Cody Crabb (17:15)
That’s a really good way to look at it because I feel like

a lot of people will just buy a property and they don’t think about it the same way as buying a business that’s the same amount of money. It’s yeah, even though it is, it absolutely is.

Matt Lavinder (17:25)
Yeah, yeah, yeah,

yeah. And there are people who really enjoy working with their hands on the project on the weekends and they enjoy their career.

And that’s great. I’m not one of those people. Like, I don’t get any of my meaning out of the house adding value to the house. I’m useless. And so that’s not where my meaning comes from. My meaning comes from building a business that does really well at those things. So we still flip over 30 houses a year here locally. I have not been in one since before COVID.

But we still do it, but we’ve a team that does that.

Cody Crabb (18:12)
Yeah, think ⁓ what I’m hearing, and I think this is pretty wise actually, is ⁓ don’t plan your job around what you think the job should be or what the job ends up being. Form it around what you actually want to spend your life doing. And I think that’s amazing advice.

Matt Lavinder (18:31)
Yeah, yeah, it’s that simple and it’s that difficult because it’s like, think it requires a lot of self-awareness to be honest with yourself about not only what you want to do, but what your skill sets are. And full-time real estate investing is, it’s a life that a lot of people desire, but it’s also what makes it great also makes it difficult. Like it’s low overhead.

we don’t have employees, we don’t have brick and mortars, talking about you know at the franchise at the franchise locations you don’t have employees, you don’t have brick and mortar, you don’t have a lot of overhead, but that means you have to do several different functions well. And the only way to do that is to be really process driven and be able to follow processes and be disciplined every day and manage your own time and

all those things.

Cody Crabb (19:32)
Yeah, so ⁓ as we kind of ⁓ pivot to the close here, I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you about AI. Before you hopped on today, you said something about the word obsessed came up, ⁓ obsession, and I can’t help but agree with that. I’ve been very interested in learning about how I can kind of implement AI in my systems, and I’d be very curious to ask you because you…

Matt Lavinder (19:48)
Yeah. Yeah.

Cody Crabb (20:00)
everything we’ve talked about today is about developing a system in order to make your life better. And I mean, isn’t that just kind of what AI is? So tell us about some of the systems you’ve created or what you’ve been able to do with AI.

Matt Lavinder (20:06)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think that’s half of it. I was on a podcast last year and we were talking about AI and I remember I was skeptical. Like I have a Tesla, I’ve had this Tesla for five years and it still can’t get into my neighborhood correctly. And so I was like, I was kind of skeptical on what AI could do. then, yeah, yeah. But I think I thought of it like most people is like, how can this make my life easier, more efficient?

Cody Crabb (20:25)
You

Like it’s cool, but you know, whatever.

Matt Lavinder (20:40)
And I wasn’t thinking about the value proposition that it adds. And so over the past several months, I have just been obsessed with a capital O.

and ⁓ full into it looking to, because once you get past consumer level AI that most people are familiar with and you dig deep into it, you begin to unlock almost like superpowers. And people that go down this rabbit hole will talk about it like this. You literally feel like you have superpowers that other people don’t.

Cody Crabb (21:17)
Yeah.

Matt Lavinder (21:22)
⁓ And then it’s about how can I leverage these superpowers and like then there’s you can do it you can you can focus it on this part of the business and then this part of the business and every piece it’s not about Increasing efficiency and making my life easier. It’s about adding value in every one of those every one of those areas

Cody Crabb (21:41)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah. You know, I’ve heard it a little, ⁓ I’ve heard of an example that was, it’s a little bit like in back to the future, you know, when he brings back the sports Almanac from the future and he knows all the sports states and stuff. It’s like, he has this thing in his hand that is, it’s just in his hand. If you want to do, could just read it, but it all depends on what you do with it. And so the, my experience and you can kind of tell me what your experience is as well. ⁓ I feel like it’s,

Matt Lavinder (21:54)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Cody Crabb (22:13)
The more you are willing to use your imagination and say, well, what if it could do that? Or what if I wonder if things could do this? that kind of line of thinking is much more useful when you’re working with AI because we don’t really know everything it can do. We’re still learning about it. Even the creators are still learning about it.

Matt Lavinder (22:22)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, the creative upside is there is no ceiling to it, but it’s also hard. Like in Back to the Future, what was the crazy scientist guy that, yeah, like he built that time machine, right? But it, like he, it was really hard work.

Cody Crabb (22:45)
Doc Brown, yeah. Favorite movie, so. Yeah.

Matt Lavinder (22:55)
And so AI, the upside of AI is just mind blowing, like what it can do for any single part of our business. Like I think about project management and acquisitions and how we manage capital. Like every one of those pieces, like it’s just mind blowing to think where this, what we’re gonna be able to do with these superpowers. But none of it is easy. Like…

Cody Crabb (22:56)
Sure.

Matt Lavinder (23:20)
Leveraging this stuff is not a passive endeavor. It’s not like you go buy a tool, press a button, and automatically you’re able to do all these great things you’ve never been able to do before. It is a grind.

Cody Crabb (23:32)
Maybe sometimes, that’s

the other thing. think sometimes there are small versions of that where you go, wow, it really is that easy. It’s almost like how everyone uses it to write emails. That’s instantly, oh, that’s so much better immediately. But tell us, can you give us a couple of tools that you’ve found or used that have been helpful for you to maybe people that, real estate investors or people in the industry that may want to check them out?

Matt Lavinder (23:37)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Man, I think the only way you can really understand is just to jump in and do it. Like you just, you just have to get in there and you get your hands dirty. Like you can listen to all the YouTube videos or me telling you what you can do, but you have to go do it. And the tech stack that you, that you, the tech stack that’s easiest to start with right now is just Claude code. And

Get in there and just start building that app like go on grok or whatever and tell it to tell me how to tell me how to build this app in Claude code and and then you’ll get in there and you’ll realize like this whole world will open up and

Cody Crabb (24:42)
Yeah,

as soon as you as soon as you kind of realize that anything that you do, you start to go, well, could I do that with code? And then you go, oh, but I don’t even have to know how to write it. I could just have I I’ve had a really good example of this. And this is the kind of thing when I say use your imagination. I had a ninety seven PDFs on my desktop and I was like, have to combine them into one single thing just because of how it was downloaded. And I I asked you to write me a script that would combine them all into one.

Matt Lavinder (24:51)
Hmm.

Cody Crabb (25:10)
PDF, all the PDFs on my desktop, that’s all I said, PDFs on my desktop. It did it in one hit and I was done. That would have taken me like 30 minutes to do that. So it’s not the big things usually. It’s these things that you spend the longest amount of time on. So what’s maybe some low hanging fruit that you would recommend someone trim off of their to-do list with AI? ⁓

Matt Lavinder (25:14)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Man, if I were a real estate investor right now, would… You can trim stuff off the web, but I would use it to… would start managing, trying to manage projects with it. You can feed it so much information about a particular project.

and it can act as a project manager. You can do that at a small scale, probably by yourself, and you could create an app to manage your projects. It’s crazy what you can do with no technical ability. Now what you build may or may not scale, ⁓ that’s a whole nother animal. We’ve got our whole tech team now focused. Everybody is obsessed with

Cody Crabb (26:15)
Yeah.

Matt Lavinder (26:27)
With this as I am so we’ve got a lot of resources pointed at this right now, but you don’t need those like you can do you could manage a project with With with AI and build a app that helps you man. It looks crazy

Cody Crabb (26:32)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So, so my recommendation would be for everyone. mean, this, I’m not, I’m more of an AI guy than a real estate guy, to be honest with you. I’m the podcast guy. I would say the, the best thing you can do is ask it. If you, if you’re, if you, if you’re like, I have no idea what to even use this for, what use cases do I even have? Literally go to your favorite AI and just ask it, just say what,

Matt Lavinder (26:48)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cody Crabb (27:06)
What are some things I could do? This is how I spend my day. What are some ways I could, you know. ⁓

Matt Lavinder (27:10)
Yeah. Yeah.

Or get it, or really go deep and get into open claw and go down the, you know, create the soul, all of that. like, man, if you’re really self-aware and you articulate, like it’ll know you better than you know yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Cody Crabb (27:17)
⁓ yeah, that’s a whole other thing. Yeah, that’s…

Yeah, even the the kind of consumer grade normal ones are sometimes a little spooky in that regard. That’s that’s the thing is that

it’s just moving so fast that I think you it’s irresponsible to ignore it at this point.

Matt Lavinder (27:39)
It’s the capacity

is doubling every four months. And that’s what I keep telling the team here. It’s like you either get on this, you either get on this train and you leverage it or you’re to get run over by it in the next four months. It’s bananas. Yeah. No, we definitely could. That’s a whole nother, that’s a whole nother podcast.

Cody Crabb (27:45)
That’s crazy.

Yeah, that’s true. Yeah. Well, thank I mean, I, could go on for another hour about this. Like I really could. So

seriously. Yeah. Well, okay. Thank you so much for, for hopping in with us today. If people want to get in touch, they want to learn about, ⁓ you know, what you do, your program, how to get involved, ⁓ maybe even work with you. What can they do?

Matt Lavinder (28:16)
Yeah, it’s newagainhouses.com. It’s that simple. That’s where we are. I’m on ⁓ all over YouTube, it’s all, find us all at that site, our local operation, our franchise operation, and all of our franchise territories. Yeah.

Cody Crabb (28:33)
And just

real quick, who would be the ideal person to reach out to? You’re perfect if what?

Matt Lavinder (28:40)
Yeah, like if you want to be a professional at this, like…

We want to be the best in the world at what we do. And if you want to make the jump like I did from doing it on the side to being full time, I know how difficult that is. And it’s really, really hard to go through that learning curve alone, and it’s very risky. And so a lot of what we built is looking backwards at the journey, the difficult road that it was for me.

wanted to do this full-time and that’s what the franchise that’s what that’s what the franchise is built for. ⁓ Most of our people aren’t construction folks. They come from all different walks of life from teaching to whatever and those it’s cool to see how those skills from former lives do translate to this particular business. Yeah.

Cody Crabb (29:26)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Absolutely. We yeah, we run

into that all the time and it’s always been fascinating like and I and you as a coach and then someone else maybe was a someone else was a like a It wasn’t a lawyer, but it someone that kind of did some kind of debate or something and it was they said it was helped them a ton during exchange during Negotiations and you never know what’s gonna come in handy. So ⁓ Well, thank you so much Matt ⁓

Matt Lavinder (29:44)
Yeah, like…

Mm-hmm. Yep. Yeah, man.

Cody Crabb (30:03)
And I appreciate you giving us your time today and you too listeners. If you liked what you heard today, go ahead and give us a like, subscribe, all the things and make sure you follow us so you don’t miss more episodes with great conversations with people like Matt Lavinder. Once again, it’s been a real pleasure and I appreciate you joining me today.