Just Do the Deal: 43 Years of Real Estate Investing & Insurance Lessons | Jeff King

Jeff King (00:00)
I firmly debate, there are good deals and there are bad deals, but every deal has its own sense of trepidation as you’re looking to make the offer, go in the contract or whatever.

Most of the time, just do the deal. You got some issues, you’re gonna have to work out this, yeah, and that’s gonna happen. This is gonna happen, and you’ll just handle it. And it may happen tomorrow, it may happen a year from now, and or it may never happen. Most of the time, just do the deal.

Meghan Escobar (01:59)
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Real Estate Pros Podcast, hosted by Investor Fuel. I am your host, Meghan Escobar, and today I have the pleasure of sitting down with an incredible young man, goes by the name of Jeff King, who is the owner and founder of Ramey Ramey, Ramey

Jeff King (02:18)
Ramey, right. Ramey.

Meghan Escobar (02:21)
Ramey King. Sorry about that, guys.

I knew I was gonna screw that up. But you know what? It’s okay. I’m not here to tell his story. He’s here to tell his story. But I’ve had the honor of chatting with Jeff prior to getting on here, and I truly believe he’s gonna be able to provide our audience with some impactful insights and education on the world of insurance. This is a man who has four decades in the industry—over four decades in the industry. And so

I—I believe that he’s got some success under his belt that he could share with us. And so I’ll let you take it from here, Jeff.

Jeff King (02:54)
Meghan, thank you very much. Glad to be aboard today. And I’ll see if I can live up to everything you just said. I—I have been in it for four years or forty years—forty-three years actually—and have been actually in the real estate investment business for most of that. And what I would initially say is, especially in real estate buying, start as early as you can. I—I was in it, but not deep enough.

And of course you look back, it’s so easy to look back a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago, and say, “Why didn’t I do that? Why didn’t I buy that property?” And you know, there—there are as many reasons to buy as there are to not buy when you’re looking at a deal. And

I firmly debate, you know, there are good deals and there are bad deals, but every deal has its own sense of trepidation as you’re looking to make the offer, go in the contract or whatever.

Most of the time, just do the deal. You got some issues, you’re gonna have to work out this, yeah, and that’s gonna happen. This is gonna happen, and you’ll just—just handle it. And it may happen tomorrow, it may happen a year from now, and or it may never happen. Most of the time, just do the deal.

That’s a—said by a guy who did not do a lot of deals that should have.

Meghan Escobar (04:07)
Well, that was definitely some great advice. And I know that we talked a little bit about what you guys are focused on at Ramey King, and that’s in the insurance world for—with in the niche of real estate. So for those that might not understand what that even means, can you give us kind of like a 30,000-foot view of what the focus is there and, you know, what markets you’re operating in?

Jeff King (04:32)
Well, we have—we—we—we are a general agency. We can do all types of insurance, but thirty-one years ago we picked real estate as a focus. And—and frankly, it kinda had picked us already, but we decl—we declared it as an official specialty focus group, practice group. You hear a lot of different terminology. And we’ve—we’ve kind of went out in the marketplace with that. And went out beyond what was—we’re in a

town north of Dallas-Fort Worth, has I think about 150,000 people now, probably had about a hundred then. But we took it first statewide, and now it’s nationwide. We’re—we’re active in all the different asset classes, and talk about what type of insurance: we’re doing the property and liability, you know, insuring against natural disasters, fires, windstorm, hurricane, hail, and then in the—the general liability, the slip and fall, the

you know, the dog issues, the ugly things that can happen.

And hopefully they don’t happen very often, but they do happen, and that’s the reason for the insurance. But we—we’re active. We do quite a bit of multifamily, we do a lot of single-family, and that’s from the person with one house to several hundred houses, and which take a long time to get there, but it can be done. And I encourage people to take it—take their real estate investments.

Far as second, there’s—there’s lots of different buyers. There are flippers, there are people that buy and hold three to five years, there are people that hold 10 years, there are people that hold forever. And we’ve got them all; they all have a similar insurance need. We have, by being a specialist, we do have, I like to say, some of the most competitive markets, and they are, but we also have the expertise to know what they’re doing and how to insure it.

And part of that is—is guiding them through the insurance, what they need. We’ll get called in by the new buyer who’s just trying to put their team together and give them an idea of what to expect, what to ask for. It’s actually quite a bit of data to ask for the insurance need. And then as they buy the property, they’re gonna go through a, you know, due diligence period. They’re gonna go into a—a—then their money goes hard at a certain day, then

then they start worrying that they’ve missed something. They haven’t, but they start worrying about that point. And then they close. But part of that, there’s—there’s mortgages to be worked out, there’s things coming out of the inspection, and we try to help them answer that. We do a lot of work with the mortgage companies to make sure their insurance is correct when—to what the mortgage company requires.

Meghan Escobar (07:48)
Yeah.

Jeff King (07:49)
And we’ll ask that at a fairly early stage, if they picked a mortgage company:

Do they have any insurance requirements, and could they send them to us? And if they don’t have that yet, we’ll reach out directly to the mortgage company to either—because they—they will have some specifications. So, and while most of our insurance will comply, we need to make sure with deductibles, limits of insurance, limits of liability, things like that.

Meghan Escobar (08:13)
For sure, for sure. I mean, that’s just the—the name of the game. If you’re gonna purchase a home, you need to have insurance and there might be some stipulations with that that come along with that. Thank you for sharing that. You know, every—every entrepreneur, every operator that I’ve ever had the opportunity to sit with, I always like to ask this question because more so because we live in such a world today where it’s like highlight, success, success, highlight, right? It’s like we see all these highlights, but we don’t

always see, you know, the struggles behind the scenes. And I think it’s important to talk about that. So with your experience, I mean, I’m sure you’ve had to pivot sometimes in—in certain scenarios. Would you mind sharing one of those moments where a deal that went sideways or a time you did have to pivot really fast?

Jeff King (09:01)
They’ve—one of the things that makes real estate hard to purchase and hard to get past is that when a first, if a seller’s doing their due diligence, they’re asking for a certain sell amount. And they want as much as they can, but they’ll have a number. And it’s probably right at the line that the buyer’s gonna say, “I’m gonna pay that, but not a dollar higher, but I’m at my max.” And initially looking at it,

it makes it hard to think, “Why should I be in the real estate business? I won’t make any money at this. You know, I’m breaking even. Why should I do that?” And—and I’ve seen that; I’ve measured a lot of deals like that. But what happens once you buy it, yeah, and it—it may break even right now. Hopefully, hopefully it does make money; you don’t want to buy it if it doesn’t make money. Or—or—or have a situation you know you can turn. You know, you just need to raise the rent fifty dollars a month,

and you’ll break even, you know, if it’s—and not double the rent. You may have a little trouble doubling the rent, but just a little bit. But I know over the long term, even the long term, maybe one year, two years, three years, that generally the rents will go up. But if you buy it, your costs are known. You bought it in 2019 at a certain dollar amount. Your mortgage, your payments are based on that.

And over time, your rents will go up and you’ll look and you’ll be ahead of it. Now, I do think of the long-term buyer. I had a—a property I owned and I—I was looking to sell it. And it occurred to me—I—I—I looked at the revenue I got out of it, and—and actually had paid it off at that point, so it wasn’t a mortgage, but it doesn’t matter. I just look at what it was compared to what we bought it. And we bought the property twenty years ago. So that is—

that’s forever a lot of times in the real estate business. But I looked at the cap rate today compared to what I bought it on. I know you don’t measure cap rate on that. Yes, it’s—but the cap rate was 25% compared to what I bought it 20 years previous. And that’s just reflective of general increase in rent over time. Now, the expenses increased with that: insurance

increased, taxes increase, utilities increase, et cetera. But the long-term hold of real estate—now, twenty years is forever. But that can happen in two to three or five years. You look at it and you’re making, you know, X amount of money and you might think, “I just almost didn’t do this.” And everybody’s—everybody’s afraid of doing a deal. There’s always a sense of trepidation to buy a new deal: “What am I missing? And, you know, what could happen tomorrow? Or

yeah, I’m locking in interest for five years. What about six years? What happens then? Do the wheels come off?” But if you’re in the business and know it, you can stay ahead of that as best you can. Do things come up that happen? Yes, they do, but you’ll handle it. You’ll figure it out. And—but I’ve had—I’ve had properties, I’ve—I can think of one, I changed management companies three different times. Finally ended up with a management—and I use management companies; I don’t self-manage.

But I changed management companies three different times and finally ended up with a management company that I thought did an adequate job. Frankly, they gave me the details I needed. Previous one just kind of kept me in the dark. And—and frankly, you do need to know, good, bad, or ugly, you do want to know how the property’s doing. But I finally arrived at one that did a good job. And I remember telling them some of my issues, and the manager says, “Well, if I’ve got problems, I’m gonna tell you about it.

Yeah, I don’t have any problem telling you about it.” Well, maybe I’ve asked more than I wanted, but say—but you do have to have the right manager. And if you are the manager—and many people are—you gotta make time to do it. You’ve got to make time to be able to show the property. I know automation is changing how this happens quite a bit. You’re not out there on Saturday mornings as much anymore showing a property. You can—they can go to your website or look this up and

and gather that, maybe just give the code and they can unlock the door and walk the property themselves. That—

Meghan Escobar (12:55)
Yeah.

Jeff King (12:56)
that’s still a little bit beyond me, but I know it’s out there.

Meghan Escobar (12:59)
Yeah.

Jeff King (13:02)
But it’s—yep, things come up, but management has been challenging. I do have good managers now. And this particular property I’m talking about, I did end up selling it and made some money selling it, and then w—went and bought another property. But just

you do want to know the issues of property. And they do come up. They’re not unique; other people have had these things happen, even the worst situations. And—and in the insurance business, we do see some of the worst situations, but nothing that we see, other people haven’t also seen. Right.

Meghan Escobar (13:35)
But—

Jeff King (13:35)
Ways to walk through it. And you know, if you got to take a minute to digest something, you know, go home,

come back tomorrow, you’ll have a different aspect to—to outlook at and figure it out. So—

Meghan Escobar (13:47)
Absolutely. Give yourself the space, right? And—and we talked a little bit about that. And—and I think this is a perfect time to kind of bring into how important it is to create the relationship. So when these things do come up, right, you have the proper resources to go and get, you know, your answers right from—from—from experts and from,

you know, people who have gone through those situations. So with that being said, Jeff, we talked a little bit about the importance of networking and versus success. And so would you mind, you know, sharing with us what’s made the biggest difference for you when it comes to, you know, being in mastermind groups or—or networking with, you know, high-level individuals?

Jeff King (14:30)
Well, we mentioned as an insurance agent, we—we—we go to a lot of these functions. I go to Investor Fuel, we meet people in the business. But I—as a property owner, I can sit there and listen. One, you know, free insurance and for property ownership. And the part I like about—there are, when a person buys a property, owns a property, there are just questions that come up: “How do you handle this?

What kind of lease do you use? What type lease terms? How do you handle your maintenance? Yeah, how do you handle your maintenance at 3 a.m. on Saturday morning? Yeah, what do y’all do here?” And it’s just everybody—there is not a question that the investor is going to have that somebody else hasn’t seen. And just having someone to ask that, and—and even someone to hold your hand. Now, hear him as an older guy, but

do I need my hand held every now and then on a question? It’s nice to have that, as you, you know, you’ve got some issue coming up. And how do you—gosh, that, what do I do? Well, if you’re in the right network, they know. They can tell you, or—or they’ve got a—they’ve got a professional in the network. It may be something—a particular vendor, a maintenance issue, an insurance issue, a mortgage issue, an inspection issue.

“How do I handle this?” Are answers. And when people try to do things in the solo world, not that they can’t get answers off the internet or other places, always watch that answer. I’m—I’m—I’m—I’m watching those answers, too, but it’s nice to have somebody who’s actually done it that you know has done it.

Meghan Escobar (16:02)
For sure. You can’t take away from the experience world versus, you know, the ChatGPT world. So—

Jeff King (16:08)
Gosh. So I—I enjoy chat; I use that. And what—one of my concerns about chat in any of the—the—the—

Meghan Escobar (16:17)
The AI, yeah. Yeah.

Jeff King (16:18)
—that you can ask them a question. You can feed them, whoever it is, you can feed the quick seat, and it’s going to give you an answer. And I have people that do that that work with me for insurance. And they’re going to answer that insurance question. I say, “That’s fine. I know it’s very efficient; I just want to make sure you understand what that answer was and why we came up with it,” and told them to do that. “And or do this or do that.”

So now I’m—I sound like an old guy talking about those young—

Meghan Escobar (16:45)
No.

Jeff King (16:45)
—but it is a tool to be used, but you owe it to yourself to find out why was what I—I see the answer, but why was that the answer?

Meghan Escobar (16:54)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff King (16:55)
What are the couple of options I could have used? If I can’t do this, what can I do now? Right. That’s not available to me. What’s my next answer?

Meghan Escobar (17:03)
Yeah, it—it’s not the end-all, be-all solution for sure.

Jeff King (17:07)
That’s right. It’s a—I do like—I do like, now here we are in a virtual setting, but we’re—we’re talking one-on-one into the group, but to be able to have someone talk that’s been in the trenches and done this and done that.

Meghan Escobar (17:21)
Invaluable. Priceless.

Jeff King (17:22)
I’ve—I—I gave you an example earlier when we talked about why someone should get in business. And—and this may be poor example, but someone goes to Thanksgiving and their—their uncle tells them, “Young man, young lady, you need to be in the real estate business.” And about the time you’re asking, “Well, what do you mean? Should I be a real estate agent? Should I—you talking about houses, talking about apartments, commercial?” You know, they’ve already—they’ve left and gone back to Wisconsin. They don’t even know what they’re talking about.

Yes, but you remember, “I was supposed to be in real estate somehow, some way.” Right. These groups, you can go ask those questions. “Yeah, my uncle told me to be in real estate. What’d I ask him? What was he talking about? How do I do that?” Right, right. And we—we are active. We go—we’re active a lot of different of the asset classes. We do houses, multifamily, triple net, commercial, and there’s different appetites for everybody. And absolutely, I—

Meghan Escobar (18:17)
Sure.

Jeff King (18:18)
I’ve seen people that will talk about houses or apartments or triple net, and they know it deeply, and they need to stay in those fields. And if—but if they want to go into another asset class, get in the right group to learn about it. It’s a—I’ve seen people come out of commercial and go into single-family and—and not have a clue what they’ve just done to themselves, or as bad as that may be.

And it—you—or—or they could go either the other direction. There’s just things to know.

Meghan Escobar (18:45)
For sure.

Jeff King (18:46)
There’s also the motivational piece. You could be sitting there with—

Meghan Escobar (18:49)
Accountability, right? I mean, huge—

Jeff King (18:51)
—your second house, or your twentieth house, or your two hundredth house, and you’ll have people that are in different areas that will just encourage you, “Keep going.” That’s why I talk about buy real estate early, and keep buying. Now, there—you—you can buy opportunity deals, you can get good prices today, might be able to sell it tomorrow and double your money. Okay, those do happen, but they’re rare. Yeah.

Meghan Escobar (19:13)
Yeah.

Jeff King (19:14)
I do think people go into real estate just say, “I’m gonna go find—” kinda like people going to stocks: “I got a good stock tip; I’m gonna go double my money.” Well, those do happen sometimes, but not very often. Just buy you a good house, buy you a good property, keep it, work it, buy you a good stock, keep it a while, it’ll go up over time, and—and you’ll—you’ll—you’ll be a hero.

Meghan Escobar (19:36)
There you go. Patience. So let me ask you this: what’s the—the next big move for—for you, Jeff, as far as, you know, scaling or the next real big opportunity?

Jeff King (19:46)
We have—we are looking—I’ve got, of course, I—I work to make money to buy more real estate. That’s—that’s my goal. That real estate—I’m a long-term holder. I have bought and sold some properties, but, you know, the long run, that is gonna be, right, my retirement. Someday I’ll go—I’ll go to the golf course and somebody else can take over here. But w—as going nationwide, the—the—the virtual world has changed how we see people, how we know people.

And—but there can be people in, you know, different cities, different states. So my goal is to add people continually with Ramey King. We have the back office to help them do their business. Insurance, like anything, can be done on a one-on-one basis, have their own agency, but it is better to be connected to a larger—or not necessarily larger, just to a—a team.

Meghan Escobar (20:39)
Yeah.

Jeff King (20:39)
Yeah, yeah, the team can be whatever size you want it to be. And we’ve got a pretty good-sized team, but have a team to help you get deals done, not unlike I’ve just described real estate. It works the same in insurance. You know, someone calls today, they’ve got—they—they have ten houses in ten different states. “Can we insure that? How do I insure that?” You can, but here’s how we do it. Or they’ve got—

yeah, th—they’ve got apartments here and houses there. “Do we combine?” Maybe you can, maybe you can’t. It’s good to have people to ask that to you and figure out how to do that. Yeah. And—and it varies per state: different rates, different appetites with insurance companies in states. And, you know, particularly where I am in Texas, we are in the hail belt. We hail—Meghan, I think you’re in Florida. Y’all have got hurricanes to continue—

Meghan Escobar (21:26)
We’ve got the floods, yeah.

Jeff King (21:28)
The flood. We do a little coastal work, and just different insurance companies have different appetites. And different insurance companies, one will be competitive, one will not, just based on their appetite where they want to write. And we are an independent agent, so we have different insurance companies that we can bring to the table. And varies per state, varies per asset class. And—

Meghan Escobar (21:48)
So all things insurance, Jeff is the king, and it’s—it’s all in the name. Listen, Jeff, I really appreciate your time, your story, and—and sharing your wisdom here with the audience. You know, insurance is—is—is—it can be a tricky business, and a lot of people just don’t understand it. And so, with that being said, if someone in the audience is looking for an insurance expert and they are wanting to learn from you or connect with you

to—to give you some business,

what would be the best way for someone to reach you? Is there email, phone numbers, social—

Jeff King (23:02)
We have our—our website is rameyking.com. That’s R-A-M-E-Y-K-I-N-G.com. There are application pages on that. Our 800 number’s 800-453-9691. My email is [email protected]. We do have a team. Most all of our real—our—our emails are just first and last name at rameyking.com. No extra dots or dashes in there.

And all of us are—can take a call, take an email. Many people will send us a—how it starts, many times someone’ll email, “I’ve got a pro—I’m looking at a property. Here’s the details. Can you help?” Now, we’re—we’re gonna call back, we’re gonna ask details of the house and the property and—and get the info—the insurance information we need. And many times it’ll be—they are—many times they don’t have it contracted; they’re just looking.

I’d say they’re—they’re looking at the offer. They’re not holding the offer anymore online; they’re looking at it, just considering making an offer. And we can give an indication at that point. Or certainly if they have a—people ask, “How soon do I need to start getting a quote?” And my suggestion is, once you know you have an accepted LOI, or specifically once you go into contract, just—there—there’s so many things happening in real estate.

People will say, “Well, I’ve got 60 days,” which seems like forever. And I can tell you many properties I’ve seen, they closed on the 59th day. There’s just a variety of things that have to happen; insurance is just one of them. That’s right. It’s appraisals, picking mortgage companies, inspections, surveys, things like that that just happen. There’s—there’s a good laundry list. You’re gonna end up paying for it when you—

you close it out when you pay the closing. But yeah. Maybe you get the buyer to pay for it. Maybe that’d be better. Or the seller to pay for it. That’d be—yeah.

Meghan Escobar (24:49)
Yeah.

Jeff King (24:50)
But we’re glad to help at any stage in any asset class. We’ve done them all. And we do businesses as well. I like to say the business that a person has that is affording them the ability to be in the real estate business, we can handle that business insurance as well.

Meghan Escobar (25:06)
Perfect. Well, we’ll also be sure to drop those links down below here, so that way you don’t even have to take the extra step to Google or write the phone number down. We will make sure to drop it below so you can just reach right directly to Jeff. And again, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to be here. It’s—it’s been an honor and a pleasure chatting with you. And yeah, so

for those of you that are tuning into this and got any value from this, please be sure to hit like and subscribe. We’ve got more conversations coming in, just like we had here with Jeff, with people who are building real businesses in real time with real people.

Jeff King (25:45)
Meghan, I appreciate it. Glad to be here, and the honor’s mine to be a—be aboard tonight. Thank—

Meghan Escobar (25:50)
Absolutely. We’ll see you on the next episode.