JP Fluellen’s Proven Strategies for Flipping Houses & Real Estate Success

JP Fluellen (00:00)
you do three deals and you can make what you’re making right now, showing up to work in a year.

Erika (01:38)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Real Estate Pro Show. I’m your host, Erika, and today I’m thrilled to be joined by JP Fluellen He’s been crushing it in the residential real estate and investing space. He is a powerhouse with Titan Real Estate Team, and he also has a flipping business, House Needs Love. Your knack for networking and relationships is really something special too, JP. Let’s…

Dive on in, I’m so excited if you can’t tell.

JP Fluellen (02:08)
Ha ha ha.

Erika (02:09)
So for those who don’t know your story, JP, give us the rundown. How did you get started in the real estate and the investing world? What was that journey like?

JP Fluellen (02:18)
Yeah, thanks for asking and appreciate you letting me be on the show here today. No, my journey started back in 2009 and basically what happened was we had bought a house and we had just kind of been just kind of chilling and my sister-in-law had come down for…

Christmas and we were just sitting around the table and we were talking about like what we’re doing in life and things that were, know, how things were going. And she’s like, I gotta tell you, I’m really getting into this real estate investing thing out in Seattle. And she was kind of talking about like she’s buying apartment buildings and she’s, you know, really excited about doing all this real estate investing stuff. And I’m like, okay, tell me more about this stuff. And she was like, yeah, these are the kind of, we’re getting some crazy returns on.

on these apartment complexes. Now, mind you, this was 2009. We’re just recovering from the crash. There’s deals galore, interest rates are fairly decent. And it just got me super excited. was like, ooh, this is a great way for us to get cash flow. And then I was like, and what else? And she’s like, and I got my real estate license too. And I was like, okay, well, I suck at school.

you know, if we’re gonna do something like this, my wife’s the one, she’s the academic, she’s the one that’s gonna get her license. Because I was thinking, you know, the barrier of entry into the real estate agent world was really hard. you know, and it’s actually not, you know, as we all know, it’s like, you know, do a crash course and take a test and then here you are, there you go, you’re out there, you know, saving the world one house at a time. And so we really just wanted, I wanted to do that because…

she was telling us about these investment deals and I was like, well, we don’t have apartments here like that in my area. So I was like, well, you know, maybe single family. She’s like, you know what, you just need to do it. Just do it and then just dive in and figure it out. So I was like, I had this strategic plan about I was gonna quit my job and just go cold turkey all in. My wife was in the military at the time.

And so I was like, okay, we have stable income for at least a year, because she’s getting out at the end of 2010, and this was in December of 2009. And so I planned my exit strategy to go to class, I took vacation and did that, and then quit my job. And lo and behold, like it wasn’t all rosy like everyone thinks it is. And the deals didn’t just start falling out of the sky like I was hoping. And…

we just decided to just get in and figure it out. And because there was a weird space in our area, the fallout from 2008 didn’t quite hit until 2011. like we just had like a lot of people in Limbo land because we’re also a military town. And so there’s a lot of people in Limbo land just trying to figure out what they’re gonna do with their houses because they’re getting PCSed and.

There was a lot of movement going on in the military space and people were upside down. And so I just started taking advantage of people. I mean, I should say take advantage. I was taking advantage of the situation in order to help them, but also further my real estate career. all in the access was to the MLS. I really wanted access to the MLS to see where I could find.

know, investment deals, foreclosures, all this kind of stuff. And so we really was trying to build two things at one time, investment properties, buy and holds, and doing, you know, real a T deals because a lot of these military were upside down. So they had to rent their properties out. So I was doing some property management and I was doing retail and then I was doing investing all at the same time. And it was, it was pretty nuts. Like I didn’t think I was going to build a business that quickly.

But it would just so happen that the environment just fostered that and figured out a way to take advantage. Nowadays, we would just jump on chat, CPT, and just be like, hey, what do I need to do in this situation? And then you get like 10,000 different reasons on how to get it done. But back then, it was just like, I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know how to get leads, and I don’t know how to do deals, and no one wants to share. And that was like, like,

Even my broker at the time didn’t know how to do real estate investing. And so I was like, oh my gosh, this is insane. don’t know, I just have to figure out, I have to lean on what I know and other people that are willing to give me something. But my fellow agents were not able to give me any info. So that’s kinda how I got into real estate investing was just, I bought my own house. We saw some opportunities outside of the MLS to buy some foreclosures. So we did that.

And back then, I could pick up a thousand square foot, three bed, two bath house for 100,000 at a 4.75 % interest rate, which at the time thought it was really high, but nowadays you’re just like, I would give anything for a 4.75 % interest rate right now. So yeah, so that’s kinda how we got started and it was just so easy to get renters in there and…

Erika (07:54)
Thank

JP Fluellen (08:01)
I was like, oh, my payment’s 700 a month. I can rent it out for 1,100. So in theory, I’m making $400 a month. But in reality, that’s not what you’re actually making. It was more like 150 because of maintenance and taxes and insurance and all this kind of stuff. But to me, the numbers didn’t matter. It was about hoarding as many deals as possible. in hindsight,

Two things, I wish I would have bought more. And number two is I wish I would have underwritten my deals a little bit better, because there might have been some deals that I probably wouldn’t have bought. But the beauty of real estate is that time makes bad deals good deals because of the appreciation. And we had a deal that we had purchased that we were actually negative 300 bucks a month. And then after three years, we were net positive, almost 1,200 a month, so.

and ended up being, it worked out pretty well after. You just hold it long enough, you know, so.

Erika (08:59)
Absolutely. And with all the different things that you have going on and you know it’s changed over time, do you multitask? How do you prioritize? You got any tips that you can share for our listeners?

JP Fluellen (09:48)
Yeah, so from a multitasking perspective, I would always do most of my investing at night and I would do my real a tea stuff during the day because what I found was nighttime, like real estate investing in the sense of how you’re trying to find deals was more like looking at the MLS, trying to…

determine whether this would cash flow or not, how much can I get for rent on this property? And so it was really less urgent to do it that way. So throughout the day, you’re getting phone calls, like, you gotta do all this running around, whether it’s showing houses or all this stuff, and it’s very time-bound. And underwriting and trying to figure out whether we’re gonna make an offer on a deal is just based on me. So I could do that in my…

basically spare time to find like buy and hold deals. Now, right now, it feels like I’m pretty rapid fire, like I’m doing a real estate deal right here, my phone will ring, I’m now doing a sales call for someone that’s trying to sell their house to me as a real estate investment deal, and I do take a lot of notes, so I’ve always got a patent paper next to me, so I’m taking a lot of notes.

And I also have like a CRM that records all my calls. So for example, if I’m trying to multitask, I know that my CRM is recording the call, so I can always go back and it gives me a transcript and I can go back and look at the transcript and be like, ⁓ okay, I gotta make this, call this guy back. And like for example, right now I’m in the middle of doing a three house purchase deal.

where the owner owns three houses, we’re gonna do like a just a mass one offer all three houses and see if they’ll take it. And so one of the things too is like I’m also part of a investing community. So we have a accountability call every single week. So I’m accountable to my accountability call and we have to report like what our goals were for this 90 days.

then we report back, did we hit our goals, what do you need help with? We kind of present some of the challenges that we’re facing. And so that also helps me stay organized because then I know I gotta have that accountability call once a week and basically spill my guts on either how great my week was or how horrible it was because I didn’t get nothing done. And because I’m a 99D99I on the disc profile,

I’m very competitive and I wanna make sure I hit my goals every week.

Erika (12:15)
Yeah, yeah, that’s awesome. JP, I want to talk a little bit about the flipping that you do with House Needs Love. What’s your main strategy these days with that and what do you love about flipping?

JP Fluellen (12:29)
So my two main strategies right now are wholesalers and direct mail. Wholesalers I love because I don’t have to spend any brain damage on sales calls because they’ve done all the sales calls for me and basically just present my deals. The one thing that has been a bit of a challenge with that is they’re doing a lot of mass blasting the.

deals out to their buyers list rather than doing one buyer at a time. And I get why they do it because they wanna make the most amount of money, but also by the same token, you can burn out your buyers list and they’re just gonna get tired of competing with a bunch of other buyers. But that has been pretty good. But one thing that I will say on a side note is don’t always take the offer.

that they’re saying that the house is for sale for. Because usually, one, there’s some wiggle room, and two, if they’re really good salespeople and they really know the comps, then they can go back and renegotiate that deal because they’ve got it under contract for too much, or they didn’t realize that that particular neighborhood didn’t quite get that much from it on an ARV. So wholesalers, and then my second one is…

Direct mail, so right now what we’re doing is letters. I feel like a lot of direct mail pieces are a lot of postcards, lot of flashy stuff, whether it’s, you know, warning your house, you know, final notice, like these types of strategies, it’s fine. But I did that during COVID actually for about almost two years. And the return on investment was pretty low.

I think we did three deals in that whole two years at 2,000 a month in direct mail, which not a good ROI in my opinion. And we switched up our strategy just, gosh, not even like three months ago. And I’m getting 10 to 15 calls a month. So with less spend doing letters. Just doing letters, I have my kids stamp the letters and we have a…

a clearing house that’ll do all of the printing and the addresses and the names and we just give them a list. So we just buy a list and then we send it to the mail house and they do all of the printing and stuffing of the envelopes. So the only thing we have to do is put stamps on them and seal them up and that’s it. So it’s been really good. We got it down to, think.

it’s like 10 to 13 cents that’s with envelope printing and stuffing, 13 cents per. So it’s been, and then we found a place that you can actually, and I don’t know if people know this, but you can actually get stamps, like regular sticker stamps, for like eight cents a stamp. Like you don’t have to pay the…

Erika (15:51)
Hmm

JP Fluellen (15:54)
you know, whatever it is, 75 cents now, a stamp right now, whatever ridiculousness it is, you can actually buy stamps in bulk. And it’s actually even cheaper than the machines where you stick them in and it does the, you know, all that stuff. So then you’re then printing the actual postage on the envelope. So if you’re out there and you’re thinking like, hey, hook me up on that deal, you know, reach out to me and we can get you the contact info if you’re trying to do direct mail. So.

⁓ And then what do I love about flipping? So the thing I love about flipping is I love finding the deals, negotiating and then closing and then thinking about what we can do with that property at the end. It just really, really like gets me excited about, you know, like.

what the potential profit is, I think, is what gets me excited. And then the design, the colors and picking out the fixtures and all that stuff, that really gets me excited. Now, of course, the down and dirty of flipping houses is that not every deal ends up being a great deal because you’re always trying to time the market, you’re always trying to figure out value and… ⁓

One of the things too is that you’ve gotta be conservative with your numbers because you can shoot for the moon and say, I know I can get this, but knowing and getting are two different things. You know you can get it based off of the comps, but the market is always changing. Every three months the market’s changing. You’ve got the spring and you’ve got the fall and you’ve got the summer and summer’s always the hot times of the year. But for example, you know.

in this current market, like you just don’t know if you’re gonna, you could have all the signs, all, you know, that says this is what it’s worth and then you get no showings. And then you’re like, what did we do wrong? And you’re trying to think through, like, did we overpay for this property? Did we put too much in rehab? Did we buy in the wrong neighborhood? There’s just like all these different things that

Erika (17:37)
Mm-hmm.

JP Fluellen (17:50)
are factors that don’t necessarily like directly reflect to the comps. And so there’s great things, there’s bad things, but I think we’ve had more wins than we’ve had, you know, break evens or losses. And so this is, that’s what I love about it is the fact that it’s the thrill of the deal and the thrill of the grind and knowing that

Erika (18:04)
Mm-hmm.

JP Fluellen (18:14)
I can get much better returns on doing real estate investing than I would doing a nine to five. I haven’t had a nine to five in 20 years. I just, and that keeps me motivated too with flipping houses is that I can get a, you know, a year’s worth of salary in one deal. So that gets me super excited about the flipping business.

Erika (18:21)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Absolutely. And I also want to talk to you about what you do with foreclosures because it’s something I don’t think we really hear a lot on the show. mean, people do talk about foreclosures, but it seems like the way that you handle it is ⁓ pretty unique. Can you go into that?

JP Fluellen (18:50)
Yeah, so we’re just getting started. So I don’t know all the little bits and pieces of it, but essentially you target trust like lists and trust sales. And then you reach out to people with a postcard that basically says,

essentially that if you’re facing foreclosure, this is how we can help. And you can stay in your home and basically we will, it’s like a bailout program almost, where essentially what you do is you target these foreclosure lists and then you send them a postcard and then you send them a mailer.

and then you try to just blast them within three days. So it’s like postcard, postcard, letter. And to try to get them to respond quickly because obviously they’re in a situation where they need to respond quickly. And if they see it in repetitive times, then they’re like, okay, this might be legit, let’s reach out. And then what we do is we meet with them, we talk to them about their situation, try to figure out how we can help.

and usually it’s because they’re behind several months. So then basically you, as the investor, you get them caught up, then you do a, essentially a contract for deed with the seller, and then you say, hey, you you can stay in the home, but you just have to rent it back from us. And then they rent it back, and then you…

sell the property back to them at a different price. maybe, for example, if the house is 200 grand and they owe 150 and you sell it back to them for let’s say one, so here’s a better example. So the house, let’s say the house, they owe 150 and the house is worth

let’s say it’s worth 250, then you basically sell it back to them for like 175. So they’re not paying ARV and it’s a number that they can live with. So they have 17 months to figure out how they can finance that home to buy it back from you. And then if they can’t, then you can DSCR that loan. can get, because essentially, because they’re not gonna pay rental rate on that, right? So then,

You’d have to just say, okay, well your term is up. We can either renegotiate this deal on different terms or you’re have to vacate the premise. And then you can get them in to basically help them go move on with life in a different scenario. You get somebody in there at rental rate. You can basically sell the property at the new price because of the appreciation and the house is worth more money because it’s worth 250 at the time.

but it might be worth even more than that when you put it back on the market a year and a half later. So there’s multiple paydays in this. And then what you then do as well is because now you have a ownership interest in the property, then you can take out a private money loan against it. So then you’re getting an acquisition fee on top of it as well. And then you keep a certain portion of that and then you…

take a difference as like a buffer into like a savings account and then that’s a 24 month private money loan. And so basically what you’re doing is you’re just continuing to roll in equity in the property as they are just paying it back. So because you can use the property now as collateral against the equity that you have in the house. Because if it’s, if they owe 150 and it’s worth 250, you’ve got 100K in equity.

And so then you can borrow against the equity against the private money loan. So.

Erika (22:35)
That’s a

really unique strategy and you know, maybe it’s related, maybe it’s not, but you had talked about how you’re in an accountability group and that you have weekly meetings. Can you share more of that with us? what about that has been a game changer? Or maybe if it’s not that, it’s something else related to networking.

JP Fluellen (22:58)
So this is what I’ll tell you. We have moved our business further faster being part of that because the collective mind is much more powerful than yours. And it’s even better than trying to search the internet or go to AI and try to ask all these questions because these are things that are working in real time. So you have real time feedback and successes.

know, entrepreneurs are always being creative and trying to figure out ways to hack certain things, right? And, you know, not everything works in your market, but for example, like that foreclosure strategy I was just telling you about, there is no way I would be able to pick up on that on my own. There’s just no way. But being part of these groups, you just are like.

my gosh, this is insane like I you know, there’s just no way I would have known that and there’s no Place to search that because you wouldn’t even know what to search for You know what? I mean, so being able to like be a part of people doing crazy new different things and Being part of a collective. I mean, you’re just gonna get you’re just gonna get more knowledge that you can put into practice that you can just have these like

constant aha moments, you know, like we’ve been exposed to so many things like I just wouldn’t even I wouldn’t have known that letters work better than postcards in my market. I wouldn’t have known that and I wouldn’t have known to try it or what verbiage to use in order to get people to respond to mail pieces and being able to like share your trials and tribulations in the real estate space and then being able to get real-time feedback is

priceless, you know, and you know a lot of real estate investment groups, you’re gonna make your money back in just the things that you’re able to now implement into your business and being like, oh I never would have thought to try that. And then you try it and then you’re making money hand over fist. And that’s the power of being part of a group, you know. so if you’re, you know.

even thinking about getting started in real estate investing, like having real-time feedback and coaching. I mean, we don’t have coaches. It’s just the accountability groups. We have training. have a portal of different ideas. There’s also…

You name it. mean, anything you can think of, you can get it. And usually you have enough to take action. It’s just, you need that nudge. Like you just want to do it and you’re like, I want to get in a real estate investing. I want to start making money. I want to get out of my nine to five. I want to move on to the next thing. And you just need that nudge. You need someone that’s like, I just did what you did and now we’re here. And I was where you were.

And this is what I did to get off my butt and just do it. And ⁓ I’ll give you an example. We had a couple that was in our accountability group and they were dabbling in real estate investing just on the side. But they just were so trapped by the golden handcuffs of the nine to five. And I told them, was like, dude, you just need to rip the bandaid off and just get in full time. mean, think about it.

Erika (25:40)
Mm-hmm.

JP Fluellen (26:00)
you do three deals and you can make what you’re making right now, showing up to work in a year.

And he was like, you know, when you put it that way, you know? And so they both quit their jobs like within a month after that. And now they’re doing full-time real estate investing. And of course it comes with its own challenges, but also they’re much more happier because they get up when they want to and they go to bed when they want to and they work when they want to and they’re just happier.

Erika (26:25)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, those groups are awesome. JP, before we let you go, if someone wants to connect with you, whether it’s your agency, your flipping, or maybe they want to partner on a deal, want to do some private lending, what’s the best way for them to reach you?

JP Fluellen (26:44)
Yeah, you can actually

just go, you can go to Google, JPFluellen. I’m probably one of the most Google searchable people out there. You can also hit me up on Instagram. It’s just JPFluellen and you’ll see my wonderful beard on there. Or you can actually just call me directly or shoot me a text and I can give you my number is 307-772-1184 or

you can just go to my website, houseneedslove.com and you can read all about me and you can hit me up there as well.

Erika (27:16)
JP, thank you so much for dropping all this investing wisdom today.

JP Fluellen (27:20)
Thank you.

Erika (27:21)
It was great having you on. everyone tuning in, if you got value from this episode, make sure that you’re subscribed to the Real Estate Pro Show. We’ve got more conversations coming up with rock stars like JP, who are building incredible real estate empires. We’ll see you on the next