How to Hire the Right Contractor for Real Estate Investing | Aaron Keating

Aaron Keating:

It’ll take you forever to get three bids. Those people won’t even remember you by the time you get to the third bid; it’s a lot of work. So today, what I recommend and how I recommend to people: send out invitations, requests, emails, or whatever to about 10 general contractors—10 contractors that you want to hire. All right. The ones that reply back, start working with them. The ones that don’t reply back, they’re too busy. Don’t spin your wheels chasing them down, looking for all these things, forcing people to work for you. So work with the people that reply.

Quentin Edmonds:

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I am your host, Q Edmonds, and I am super excited to be here today. Super excited, but I am. I’m excited because I have a fantastic guest with me. And you guys know, if you’ve been following me, I love being able to peek through other people’s experience, glean from their life lived within the real estate space, within business. And so today I have a fantastic guest. He is a general contractor. He loved building things up. I think he loves building things up, but that’s not what he said. That’s kind of me projecting on him, just based on some of the things we’ve been talking about. But he talked a little bit about starting over, but a little bit about building things back up to where he wants to be now. And so I’m excited for us to learn about his journey and for us to learn from Mr. Aaron Keating. Mr. Aaron, how are you doing today, sir?

Aaron Keating:

Well, Q, how are you doing today?

Quentin Edmonds:

Yes, sir, man. I’m doing good, excited to be here. Let me say this first: I want to thank you for your time. I think time is our most precious commodity, so I value you for being here today. Top of the morning. I guess maybe we’ll get into a little bit of where you are, but I want to again say thank you. And listen, Mr. Aaron, I’m the type—I love to dive right in. So I would love for you to tell the people what’s your main focus these days. If you don’t mind, give us a little origin story, how you got into the space that you’re in. And then if you don’t mind, tell the people where you are in the world. So, Mr. Aaron, you have the floor, my friend.

Aaron Keating:

Well, good morning. Thanks for having me on here. I appreciate you guys setting all this up and allowing me to talk, so thank you. So I’m a general contractor. My first job out of college back in the nineties was in a lumberyard. And then since then, back there in the nineties, the stocks were doing pretty well, and I was in telecom. That was kind of my first real job out of school, right? And I used the stocks then to buy my first company, which was a property management company. And that, of course, got me right into taking care of homes, taking care of everything. And that was also the first time I really realized the importance of relationships right away. It was just—and you can imagine dealing with tenants. We’ve all kind of probably been there. And so you really learn a lot quickly when you’re dealing with people. And so that kind of got me down the path of fixing the houses and doing these kind of things.

And I did that property management for a couple of years, and I moved out to New Jersey. And out there I did some more contracting and worked with some people in various trades, did all those kind of things. Ended up with a production home builder—one of those builders that takes like twenty acres, puts a bunch of houses on it. And there I did all the office work; I was purchasing, estimating, doing those kind of things. I’ve had a lot of exposure to all the different sides and seeing how the different relationships apply. That production home builder was more of a corporate entity, so the relationships and the way they manage those were quite different than when I was just dealing with my mom-and-pop shops, yeah. But that home builder eventually moved me out here to Seattle. And that’s where I am right now; I’m out here in Seattle. And that was just in time for the recession to hit, yeah. So all the home building went away.

So I had to reinvent myself. Then I trained myself to become a locksmith and just kind of back into the trades and doing that work for a number of years. And then out here in Seattle, the investors or people kept asking me to do more things and helping them. I became a state home inspector. Out here in Washington, you have to be certified by the state to be a home inspector, yeah. I’ve been doing that for 10 years. And so now, eventually after home inspecting, people just kept asking me to do things. I have the skills, so I started helping people, building for people. My first job was doing a ceiling fan for an old lady. She just needed the ceiling fan in her bedroom, so I did that. And next thing I know, I’m remodeling kitchens and doing bathrooms, and then it just goes from there. And so now I build all the ADUs and build houses, build garages, remodel homes. We have trees fall on houses out here a lot, so I do that kind of work. So that’s my story and how I got out here. And through all those steps, it’s just been living on the East Coast, living on the West Coast. I’m from Kansas and Texas originally, yeah. It’s just really interesting for me to see the personalities and how relationships are handled in such different ways in different places, yeah.

Quentin Edmonds:

Yeah, love it, man. Thank you. Thank you for taking me through the journey, how you got into the spaces that you’re in. And Aaron, I often say destiny has no wasted moments, right? We make pivots in life; we make pivots in our business, the business structure, in our work, but it’s all working together, right? It’s fortifying the people that we are now. And we learn from the lessons, we learn from the success, and sometimes it’s the things that we learn that didn’t work that fortify us to say, “Okay, this is where I need to be right here.” And so, Aaron, I would love to know, man: throughout your transition, throughout your journey, what has the journey revealed to you about yourself? Has it made you more disciplined, more humble, increased your tenacity? What has the journey revealed to Aaron about Aaron?

Aaron Keating:

Probably the tenacity is a good word. You just really have to decide: we all have one life, right? So if you want to do something, you gotta go do it. Don’t just be like, “I can’t do that.” Why not? It’s your life; go do it. And so that kind of drive moving from—in investing, in real estate, in entrepreneurship, you get knocked down all the time, yeah. All the time you get knocked down. And if you’re not gonna get back up and go do it, then there’s no point. So really, it’s that drive: this is what I like to do, and I really enjoy it. Things are going well, and I’m helping doing the remodels and helping people understand. It’s so much fun; it gives me lots of pleasure. So I really enjoy the relationships. I enjoy trying to help people understand the complicated world that is contracting and real estate.

Quentin Edmonds:

Absolutely. Absolutely. I love that. And so, obviously, I am not the visionary that someone like yourself is. When I go into a house, I don’t know where things go; my brain doesn’t work like that. When people talk, I see in visions. But obviously, it would seem that there are some system and operational things that you probably see when you go in: this should be here, this should be there. So I want to talk a little bit about operational things, right? Systems a little bit. So from your perspective, what are some operational things that you put into place or you use on a daily basis that help you be successful?

Aaron Keating:

Probably the one thing I do—I do a system, and it’s always the same. All right. So you start with the land, make sure the land’s all right. Then you do the foundation, then you do the walls, right? You build the house from the ground up, outside in. So you just follow that system all the time. If you’re gonna be a real estate investor, especially one that wants to do flips and those kind of things, highly recommend: get your system down, find properties that can fit into that system, yeah. A really successful system that I know: you go in, demo everything out, Kilz everything, and then you just go in and paint it and put in your finishes, yeah. But the system’s always the same. You drop your dumpster at the same time, right? You have your crews, and that’s where the relationships come in.

If you want to be a real estate investor that regularly does houses and you can get a rhythm going, your crews are extremely important, yeah. So you have to have that relationship with them. The guy that I have—one of my main crews—I’ve been working with him since COVID. So what is that, six years now? Yeah. So he and I have been working on that kind of level. And you have to have a real relationship with this guy; it can’t be monetary. You don’t want to be treated monetarily, right? So the contractor doesn’t want to either. So it’s really important: get that relationship, get the system so there’s no surprises. You’re trying to get it to where there’s no surprises, yeah. It’s always demo everything out, fix what needs to be fixed, finish it up. Yeah, get that system in place.

Quentin Edmonds:

Love it, man. Absolutely. Mr. Aaron, how important is it to hire a contractor? What are some of the best practices? Talk to me a little bit about the hiring process and how important it is.

Aaron Keating:

So a general contractor for a real estate investor is tricky, and it really depends on the kind of investor you are. So if you’re the kind of person who’s gonna buy a house and then you’re gonna go in there and fix it, and you’re gonna go on YouTube and you’re gonna figure out the things you don’t know—if you’re that kind of investor, you do not wanna hire a general contractor. I’m too expensive; it’s not gonna fit, right. That’s probably the most challenging level of being a flipper. When I’ve seen them, those guys are having the most challenges.

Then you have gentlemen or people who have some skills, and so they understand construction a little bit. So they can use their own skills that they have, and they can bring in maybe some friends to do the stuff they don’t know. Once again, a general contractor is too expensive; that’s not fitting in your budget, no, right.

If you want to make a living on it, you yourself want to become a general contractor. You want to work on those processes that we just talked about. You want to be working on that financing. You want to make sure everything’s rolling, because for the investor, it’s about time, right? That’s our biggest thing. That’s your cost; that’s your holding cost. Those are all those kind of things out there. So if you can become kind of the general contractor and this becomes your full-time job, you can be successful at that because you can focus, you can get your systems going, you can do those kind of jobs, yeah. Whatever it is.

Now, if you’re a big corporate guy and you want to go buy a bunch of apartments, then you definitely want to get a general contractor because he’s gonna be able to get your time and organization in place. So depending on what level you wanna be there. So if you are looking to hire a general contractor, things have changed. In today’s day and age, with the amount of information out there and the way people are, traditionally it used to be: go get three bids and take the guy in the middle, yeah, right? That’s not how it works anymore. People are too busy. It’ll take you forever to get three bids. Those people won’t even remember you by the time you get to the third bid; it’s a lot of work.

So today, what I recommend and how I recommend to people: send out invitations, requests, emails, or whatever to about 10 general contractors—10 contractors that you want to hire. All right. The ones that reply back, start working with them. The ones that don’t reply back, they’re too busy. Don’t spin your wheels chasing them down, looking for all these things, forcing people to work for you. So work with the people that reply. And it’ll probably only be three, maybe. It’s not gonna be very many. But you still want to keep working with them. And then what you’re looking at is: how do they communicate? How do they do their billing? How do they do their changes? All those kind of things. And then trust your gut, right? Goes to the relationship. Trust your gut. Go with the guy—even if he’s more expensive, but you really like the way he communicates, go with that guy, right? Go with the guy that has the best communication. And trust your gut. Shiny things are not always what we want to go after, right? So just understand what they’re saying, have faith in yourself, and trust your gut. ‘Cause it’s a relationship and a journey that you’re gonna go all the way through. So be careful.

Quentin Edmonds:

So well said. So, Mr. Aaron, what’s next for you, sir? What is the next real goal? What are you looking to solve at scale next, man?

Aaron Keating:

So out here, we just kinda got our websites going on. And so we’re getting—and all the changes that have gone on with AI, so we have to do all the AI stuff now. Like I said, I’m kind of this old general contractor, and I have great computer guys and my team really helps me with all this, and so now they’re telling me we gotta get AI-certified and all these other things. Yeah, that’s more stuff you do, Q.

Quentin Edmonds:

Absolutely. Now I ask everyone this question. You already touched on it, so we may expand it a little bit, but everyone that comes on, I always ask their unique perspective on the word relationship. Now, you’ve mentioned community, you’ve mentioned relationship, we’ve talked about it, but I wanna hammer it home even more. What is your unique perspective on healthy relationship building within business, and what are some relationships that have helped you within the space that you’re in? So again, I want to expand a little bit more. Tell the people, from your perspective, how important healthy relationship building is within business.

Aaron Keating:

It’s like the foundation. There is nothing more important than your relationships. First you meet somebody, yeah, then you get to know them, and you have a little bit more of a conversation. And then when you’re ready to do business, you really should have that hard conversation: “Look, if this goes bad, this is what we’re gonna do. If this goes bad, this is what we’re gonna do.” And if you have that kind of relationship, you two have a pretty good chance of being successful and working together, yeah. But it has to be, especially business—let’s take emotion out of it. No emotion in contracting. None of it. Get it all out; no emotions, right. And so it’s business, and you want to be very straightforward and honest with each other. And let yourself be honest with them just as much as you want them to be honest with you, yeah. So it is just the foundation. I cannot even comprehend something more important than your relationship.

Quentin Edmonds:

Love it. So well said. Listen, I want to make sure we hit everything. So is there anything that was on your mind before we came in? Something that maybe you—”I want people to know this about me. I want people to know this about this topic.” Is there anything that you had in your mind that you wanted people to know? Is there any other words, or maybe education, motivation? Again, I just want to open the floor that if I have not asked the right question, I want to make sure you get out any message that you feel like the people need to know.

Aaron Keating:

So the biggest thing: take your time when you’re in there investing, do your research, understand what’s going on, and have faith in yourself. Have faith. You’ve done your studying; just like we’re saying, you’ve done your research. You can make this work, can make these things happen, but don’t hesitate to reach out for help. Find a trusted resource, such as myself. If anyone wants to reach out to me, I’m just up here in Seattle, but I’ll talk to you all day long about it. But have those resources. And don’t—like I said, get the emotion out of it, especially your own. Get your own ego out of it. So many times I go into a house and it is falling down, and I have this investor: “No, all we got to do is put this up and that up.” It’s just not gonna happen, man. I know you want this to happen, but it’s not gonna happen, right? Don’t talk yourself into the investment. Doing a house is nothing but math. So don’t do anything emotionally in investing.

Quentin Edmonds:

Yes, sir.

Aaron Keating:

That’s probably the biggest that I see people get into all the time.

Quentin Edmonds:

Yes, sir. Mr. Aaron, sir, I appreciate that, man. Great, great, great words of wisdom. If someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate with you, learn more about what you’re doing, how can they get in contact with you, sir?

Aaron Keating:

Yeah, the best way: just through my website, it’s arkwashington.com—A-R-K Washington all spelled out dot com. There’s forms on there and I read them all the time, so put whatever you want in the comments and I’ll reach out to you.

Quentin Edmonds:

Absolutely. Well, listen, let me say three things to you sincerely. One: again, thank you for your time. I think time’s our most precious commodity. I’ve said it, I will continue to say it, so thank you. Secondly: thank you for what I call the gift of your integrity, the gift of your authenticity. Coming and really sharing your story. I believe when we share our stories, we cast seed out, we throw seed out, and somebody can take that seed and kind of plant it in what they’re doing in their situation and really produce a harvest. So I thank you for coming, casting some nuggets, some real seeds. And lastly: thank you for your mindset. Thank you for the way you think, your unique perspective on things, and bringing that mindset to this platform. I appreciate you coming on today.

Aaron Keating:

Thank you for having me. It was a very enjoyable experience. Thank you.

Quentin Edmonds:

Absolutely. Well, listen, y’all heard Mr. Aaron. His information is in the show notes. Please get in contact with him. But definitely make sure you’re subscribed here, because I promise you we’re going to continue to bring on amazing people, just like Aaron Keating. So, sir, I say thank you again. And everyone else, y’all have a fantastic day.

Aaron Keating:

Thanks, everybody. Good to see you.