Lessons from Real Estate Mentor Cliff Gager

Dylan Silver (00:01.166)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Dylan Silver. And today on the show I have Cliff Gager. Cliff is a 30 year real estate veteran who specializes in flipping, wholesaling, and building long term rental wealth. He’s helped thousands of investors break free from the nine to five grind by teaching real world step by step strategies anyone can follow. Cliff’s passion is turning everyday people into competent cash flowing deal makers. No money, credit or experience required.

Cliff, welcome to the show.

bestmentor (00:32.77)
Hey, Dylan. Thanks for having me on the show. I’m really excited to be here. Very excited. This is awesome.

Dylan Silver (00:39.17)
I’m glad you’re here. We are both actually have some experience living on ranches. You were talking for the show. I’m on a ranch here in DFW. So I tell my guests you may hear some farm animals in the back. You that you were in a ranch in SoCal. Where are you based out of now? I think you mentioned Florida, right?

bestmentor (00:44.718)
Yes!

bestmentor (00:51.095)
Hahaha

Yeah.

Yeah, I, uh, my hometown is Florida, Orlando, Orlando, Florida. And, uh, I’ve been away for 25, 30 years and, it’s, was time to come back home and kind of slow the pace down a little bit and, uh, enjoy my grandkid.

Dylan Silver (01:13.974)
Amen. I’m so jealous. tell people Orlando I don’t have too much experience with but but South Florida, Fort Lauderdale, Miami area. I think that’s one of the hubs of real estate young entrepreneurs in the country. And I think I’m in a great space in Dallas for single family home investing. But for young people who are networking and trying to get to the next level, it does feel like there’s magic in the water out there in Florida.

bestmentor (01:16.129)
Hahaha

bestmentor (01:22.552)
Yeah. Yeah.

bestmentor (01:29.198)
Yeah.

bestmentor (01:40.385)
Yeah, it’s Orlando is a little bit different. There’s a lot of hedge fund ownership here as far as the rental market. And you have a transitional type venue here because of epic, universal Disney. So you have a lot of people coming here and you have a lot of support service for those people. And most of the people in the support services

part of those companies are renters, so there’s a big rental market here. But I don’t like to play in my own backyard. I have. Things that I do across the United States that I’ve been doing for a long time, and I just reside here now in Florida and bask in the sun and play with my grand kid jet ski go on the water. Go to the beach. You know the things that you do when you’re a kid and you can’t afford it, but now you can afford it and you go anyways.

Dylan Silver (02:40.634)
That’s a lot that I aspire to reach for sure. Let’s pivot to the start, the start of the journey. How did you get into the real estate space?

bestmentor (02:51.501)
I’ll give you, you might not understand this, you being younger, I’m 60 and I say things sometimes and people look at me like, what? But because I’m getting older now, I say things that are old, you know, I saw, but I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version. That was a book that had little tiny short stories and you could get the whole point across like in five pages. But I started back in 1991, I had a car accident which stopped me from doing construction work.

and I fell into the mortgage business because I really didn’t know what I was going to do. I liked working outside. I didn’t want to work in an office. And the opportunity arose and I took it. And I figured if I can’t make it because it was commission only, if I can’t make it in three months, I had to go back to work no matter how much pain I was in. Right. So I got in at the right time. It just rates drop.

bestmentor (03:52.14)
the 80s. They were down to about 8 or 7 % when I got in. So, I ended up trying to get real estate agents to do business with me. But the average age in ST Petersburg, Florida at the time for the real estate agents was like 60 and I was 20 something right? So, uh,

Dylan Silver (04:10.18)
Mm-hmm.

bestmentor (04:17.43)
They looked at me as a punky kid and it was really difficult to get them to trust their client to you with their mortgage. didn’t want to, you know, they wanted the old guy with the gray hair, which I got now. I shaved it off so nobody sees it. But I fell into doing refinances. To make a long story short, basically I went into the back room as I was learning the files and the paperwork because it was all new to me.

And what I realized in the back room where all the old files were was all these cases of 12, 13 and 14 % interest rates. So I went to the manager who was helping me and I told her, says, you know, these are all real high. says, can’t we do something with them? Because I can’t get these realtors to do business with me. Long story short, she said, yes, that’s called a refinance. Nobody wanted to do it because all of the big shots in the office were like, we’re originators. We don’t touch refinances.

Nobody does that. I did. My first month of closings, I closed 42 loans because it was literally I got on the phone. said, hi, this is Cliff Gager with Moulton Allen and Williams, your mortgage company. And they freaked out because nobody ever called you back then. Right. This is 30 years, 35 years ago. And the only reason you got a call from the mortgage company is if you were late. Right. So I said, don’t worry, nothing’s wrong. I says, I was going over your file here.

Dylan Silver (05:22.436)
Wow.

bestmentor (05:45.516)
And I realized that you’re paying too much on your mortgage. And then I would just shut up. And there would be this dead silence. And they’re like, what do you mean? And I said, oh, well, you’re paying $420 a month. Or I’m sorry, you’re paying $620 a month. And you should only be paying $420 a month. And then I’d shut up again. Silence wins, by the way. And so they would immediately say, how do I do that? And it was like.

just sign this paper. So I would literally make an appointment for him. They were all local. I’d go out the next day. I’d go through all the paperwork explaining it to them. You understand this terminology and some of the listeners will. Their prepaids, their escrows were transferred to them after closing because they were an escrow. So they got those refunded. And then I only collected like think 14 months for insurance and two or three months for taxes.

to build their new escrows. So that’s all they had to come to closing with. And then they got that money back. So it was like, look, it’s, and I explained it to them like that. And literally I had nobody tell me no. It was, it was like, gosh, if I could build a time machine, I’d go back to that same time again. I’d clone myself and I would have refinanced everybody in the United States.

Dylan Silver (07:09.882)
So let’s talk about that.

bestmentor (07:09.939)
because you could add on a lot of points and stuff back then. There was no Dodd-Frank laws or truth in lending and all that. So I was making, I think around $3,500 alone. And literally my first month of closings, it was in November, it was chaos at the title company, because I had 42 closings that day, because they had to get in at a certain time.

so that they didn’t have to come in with a big allows a lot of money because of the beginning of the month. So it was crazy. And that’s I did that for like nine, 10 months, ran out of people in the back room. What I should have done was quit and went to another mortgage company and did that there. You know, I should have just done that until, you know, the cows, the cows come home at the ranch, right? So then I started trying to get real estate agents because now I’m experienced.

Dylan Silver (07:56.004)
Yeah.

bestmentor (08:05.546)
I should show you a pic, it would take too long, but I looked 12 years old. I mean, I didn’t start looking old until about like last year. At 30, I looked 17. So, I mean, I’m not complaining, but the funny thing was is I still couldn’t get real estate agents to give me their business because they looked at my age. So I ended up going to the newspaper and started working with people that were doing for sale by owner.

Dylan Silver (08:14.842)
You

Dylan Silver (08:19.695)
Yeah.

bestmentor (08:35.614)
because nobody was helping them on the mortgage side. So I went in and I just called their ads and I says, is somebody helping you? And no, and here’s what I’m gonna do for free. I’m gonna print up flyers for your house and on the flyer is gonna be my information for the mortgage because nobody’s helping you with that. they’re like, everybody’s like, yeah, that’s great. And you’re not gonna charge me anything? Nope, it’s free to you. And I would go to their house. I had pictures, I made a nice flyer for them.

And on the bottom, had my contact information for the mortgage. And then I put like three payment options, know, 15 year fixed, 30 year fixed and an adjustable rate mortgage. And what that did was it got me business and I was doing three or four loans a month. Back then, I was making five, six, $7,000 a loan because you could. So two people that I ran across in that were investors like we are today.

and nobody was helping them, but I called their ads. in introducing myself to them, we started working in a relationship together. I started doing all their end user financing and I started finding acquisition money for them. So I did hard money loans. Well, I charged a lot. I can’t really say on air.

Dylan Silver (09:58.944)
You did great!

bestmentor (10:00.947)
But the statutory limitations are over, so I don’t have any recourse. But I was doing 18 and 10. So I’d charge them 18 % and 10 points. And they were glad to do that because it was bam. I’d give them acquisition money, the whole amount. I’d give them the whole amount. We would be named as the owner. we did a funky little contract, kind of like a lease option type thing back then.

They did the repairs. He came in with the repair money. He did the repairs. Our key to key for these guys was 45 days. So that’s why the 10 points up front was because we weren’t making anything on interest, honestly. But after doing that for a while, I got all of their phone calls. They sent all their phone calls for all their ads to me. So I fronted all their ads. And I worked those people. There was good credit, bad credit, no credit.

and I fixed them back in the days when you got credit reports that weren’t FICO scored. They were just a list of things on there. So I’d work with them and get them to where they could qualify for the loan. And then I was charging, the current rates were 7 % and I was charging them 8 or 9%. So I was getting a bump from the mortgage company was paying me for raising the interest rate and I was getting six to eight points.

So if it’s $100,000 mortgage, I was getting six to $8,000 just for bumping their interest rates from seven to eight or 9%. All it did on the mortgage for the buyer was raise their interest or their payment like maybe 50 to 75, maybe $100 more. But over 30 years, it’s a lot of money. So the lenders were paying us really good money. And then I charged the seller, which was my investor, two points.

and I would do one origination. So I was getting 10 points alone. So I was making 10,000 bucks. And then the investor was giving me money through my real estate company, because I formed a real estate brokerage business, like a flat fee of 3,500 bucks. So it was like, it was gold. And I was doing five to 10 closings per month for these two investors.

Dylan Silver (12:15.663)
Wow.

bestmentor (12:21.914)
And one day I’m sitting at the closing. I orchestrated everything because I was the lender. So I was in control of the money. The guy in control of the money makes all the rules and stipulations. So at closing, on my closing instructions, I’m getting the closing statement. And one day I’m looking at it and it said, the seller, which was my investor, $28,000. And I made sure all my stuff was right. But it really hit me in the head. I was doing everything.

Dylan Silver (12:51.738)
Anyone else?

bestmentor (12:51.928)
answering the phones for the buyers. The only thing I was doing everything, the only thing I didn’t do was the repairs and look at the house on the acquisition to make the purchase. But I was there doing almost everything else. So I put it together and I says, I can make that 28 grand on top of what I’m already making. And all I need to do is switch seats at the title company. I just needed to sit in his chair.

Dylan Silver (13:01.551)
Yep.

bestmentor (13:18.312)
So what I did was is I talked to one of the realtors, because I worked with all the realtors, and I says, hey, I’m looking for something for myself. And even though I was making all this money, I was broke. You take a construction guy and you give him a lot of money, he’s got a lot of cool stuff and no money in the bank. I’ve changed a lot. So the funny thing is I went to the realtor. I says, I want to buy one. I went and I looked at it. It was a foreclosure, it bank owned.

Dylan Silver (13:33.87)
That’s

bestmentor (13:48.07)
You walked in it and it was a little rectangle house. So when you walked in the front door, you looked at the sliding glass doors in the back and the guy built an addition on the back on a slab with no footer. It cracked the slab in half and the roof pulled apart. So it looked like structural damage. I was in construction. I looked at it I’m like, we’ll just tear this off and make it go away and it’ll be good as new. So I put a ridiculous, it was $120,000 house.

I offered him $40,000 cash closing 30 days. They took it. Because it had been on the market for like 130 days. Everybody walked in, turned around and walked out because they saw structural damage. There was none. It was a slab addition that had no footer. Oh, and the guy built a stone fireplace in the corner, which is, know, sank it down just like that. So, so…

Dylan Silver (14:25.754)
That’s how you do it.

Dylan Silver (14:43.962)
Wow. Wow. What a deal.

bestmentor (14:46.567)
I got it on a contract. had to come up with earnest money in five days. So I went to my investor and I backward re-engineered the deal. And I says, it’s worth 120. And if you do the repairs and you take out your costs and you take out the closing costs and all of that, and your profit, if you buy this house for 65 grand, it matches and meets your expectations on a deal. I said, do you care how much money I make?

He says, I don’t care how much money you make. We’re all in this to make money. He says, if you can bring me deals like this, bring them to me all day long. And that’s all I needed to hear. I did that deal. I made 24 grand. I used his money. We did a simultaneous back to back double closing. And if you don’t know what that was, I didn’t either. The title company handled everything. I basically assigned my contract to him at closing.

Dylan Silver (15:16.282)
Right.

bestmentor (15:40.537)
and I got a check for 24 grand. He got the keys, the bank got their $40,000. And then I did the loan on the buyer that bought the house from him and I made another $13,000.

Dylan Silver (15:53.444)
What a deal. So in that deal you made about 35… Yeah, wow.

bestmentor (15:56.806)
Well, I made 24 plus 13.

So on one deal and the house only sold for $120,000 because most of the money came from the, the 13 came from the lender. And I think my investor made $25,000 on the profit. And I didn’t stop because once I figured that out that I could do that over and over and over and over.

Dylan Silver (16:05.686)
Unbelievable. So you had proof of profit after that.

Dylan Silver (16:12.922)
Mm.

Dylan Silver (16:19.482)
Let’s finish.

bestmentor (16:27.174)
And then I got really, really smart and I says, I don’t even need them anymore. I can build my own crews. So I did that and we did 248 houses in three and a half years. And I had no clue what I was doing, but it was common sense. It was logic. very, I have a high IQ, but I have ADHD. So it’s like, I can concept things really quick. But then I forget, it’s like, oh, squirrel.

So I built a system. It was repetitive. I made it work every single time, working with the title company, working with the lenders, working with everybody. And it just worked. And then I had a divorce. And then I didn’t factor that in. And we’ll just leave it at that. I’m not even going to talk about that. But then after the divorce, I fell into the seminar business.

Dylan Silver (16:57.764)
the tape.

Dylan Silver (17:16.76)
does yeah

bestmentor (17:26.374)
which I just answered an ad. I didn’t know what I was gonna do. The divorce was really bad. Took 10 years to final. But I know it was terrible. But I’m over it now. It’s been a long time, 20 something years since. So I was like, I don’t know what I wanna do. I didn’t know if I wanted to go back into being an investor anymore. I got burned really bad on that, you know, the divorce. So I answered this ad and it said, do you know anything about the mortgage business? Do you know anything about

real estate, know anything about that, this, that, the other thing. And what happened was it was a seminar company looking for people to give advice to their clientele base, which was all on the phones. And so, Cliff, you’re gonna be stuck in a room, you’re gonna answer phones, and you’re gonna give real estate advice all day long, and you’re not gonna have to look at anybody, and I was like, oh, this was perfect for my mental state at the time.

and I could make commissions on any sales that I did. So I was making three, $400,000 a year working for the seminar company. My salary was about a hundred, but I was doing upgrades on their coaching and learning and software and stuff to the point where the sales department almost walked out of the company because I’d get you on the phone and I’d be like, okay, let’s work this deal.

Dylan Silver (18:39.737)
Wow.

bestmentor (18:52.376)
get out your software and let’s analyze this. And they’re like, we didn’t buy the software. Click, I’d hang up the phone. And they called back and they said, something happened. I think we got disconnected. I said, now, if you’re not going to be serious about this and you’re not going to have the software, then I don’t have time. I’ve got other people that are serious about doing it. No, no, no, no, we’ll buy the software. I got 17 % commission. So I mean, I’m not bragging or anything, but it was just, it was a natural thing. It really worked well. The problem was,

the education that these people were getting really was substandard. so I went to the company and I says, hey, let me go out and teach a three day class on the weekends. I’ll work here in the office during the week and then I’ll go out and fly me out to wherever and I’ll sit down with them for three days. So day one, I just did raw, raw, know, get them in the mood, get them understanding how the process of what I was doing. I taught them what I did and

I got them into the mindset that I was in. And then the next day, we started calling real estate agents to go look at houses. And I says, I didn’t set anything up pre set or anything. I said, we’re doing this live right here, right now. And I would get real estate agents just like that instantly to give us access to houses. And we’d go look at the houses. Sometimes we’d put offers in.

and I’d walk them through the house and explain, know, look at this, look at this, this is what you want to be careful of. And so when they left that, and then we’d go to Home Depot and I’d walk them through and I said, here’s all the materials that you need to use. you know, you don’t want to use this expensive stuff because nobody cares. Like the TV shows today, I could talk for four hours on that. But the interesting thing was, is I also back in the day took them to the courthouse

to look up the foreclosures and work directly with the banks and whatnot. You can’t really do that today. They’ve changed the system how it goes. And then on the last day, it was again, just motivational getting them all lined up so that they could function. So I was like one of the originators of the bus tour. When you hear these people doing bus tours and they take investors out and show them houses. That was me. I started doing that in, I think 99 is when I started doing that.

bestmentor (21:17.319)
And I’ve been doing that ever since I did it for a lot of the seminar companies. I don’t promote any of the seminar companies. I got out of those companies for certain reasons. And of course, anybody watching this who has ever dealt with the one of the seminar companies can understand what I’m saying. There’s a lot of good people out there, but there was a lot of companies that just how much you got on your credit card and that’s what their goals.

Dylan Silver (21:43.31)
you

bestmentor (21:43.971)
So I started my own company and I serviced the seminar businesses by doing the weekend classes. I did the quote, mentor coaching or mentor classes live. And I did that for all the big ones. I won’t mention any names, but if you heard a name, you would know them. They were all over TV and somebody’s in the White House now.

But yeah, so I did that for many, years. And then I finally just broke away from the seminar companies and started doing it on my own. Primarily my real estate business is expanded because what I did was while I was teaching these classes all over the United States, I was building relationships with people. And then I just cloned and duplicated what I did in all of these other locations.

And rather than me having to do the deals myself and have these people work for me, I just helped them do the deals and they threw me money. So it was never a, I want this much, I want that much. said, you know, whatever you want to give me and you feel is deserving, you throw that at me and I’ll make it a consulting fee. I says, or you can join my one year coaching program and you know, we’ll split the deals if you want to do that. So I offered that for a while.

And, but my primary business is right before COVID was buying houses in Cleveland, Ohio, running them through my system, getting them all cleaned up, running them through Cuyahoga County Housing Authority to get them as far as Section 8 tenants installed. The rental rates are just phenomenal, phenomenal up there.

And then what I would do because I was living in Southern California is I would have a seminar or go to seminars and pitch my stuff there as far as the house is for sale. And I’d hold my own seminars and I would sell them to people that were employed by the state, had a retirement account. I had a woman that does nothing but change their accounts into self-directed investment accounts. So like

bestmentor (24:03.156)
And I don’t know anything about that. That’s her job, right? So I don’t need to cloud my mind with it. All I know is they have a checkbook for their account and they can write a check. And a typical California government employee has 500,000 to a million dollars sitting in their account at two or 3%. So the houses we were turning in Cleveland, I was selling between 130, 120, up to $200,000.

Dylan Silver (24:22.361)
Wow.

bestmentor (24:32.129)
and they were turning like a 18, 19, 20, 25 % ROI tax deferred. They couldn’t pull any of that money out, but instead of making two, three, 4%, now they’re making 15 to 20 % return. Everybody loved me and eventually they’d want to use all their money to buy all the houses that I had. So I never had a buyer problem and that went real good until COVID hit.

COVID was devastating in California to say the least. I left California about two years ago and came back to Florida. And as I was driving out, this was in 2023, right? Yeah, 23, 24. I saw a guy driving with a mask on with three other masks on top of it and a face shield driving in his car with the windows up by himself.

Dylan Silver (25:28.896)
It’s crazy.

bestmentor (25:29.173)
So I won’t give you the sad story of how COVID affected my business, but it shut it down for two to three years. And I just redirected. I took the time off basically to just deep dive inside to find out what I really wanna do. that’s what I’m doing now. I’m getting back into the Cleveland market. I have a whole crew there. I have a whole team there. I got property management.

I’ve got a student that wants to do multifamily. I never did multifamily. I liked single families. At one point I had 428 single family rental properties. And for me, it was no big deal because you hire staff when you have that many people renting from you. So I didn’t know who was in what building. I don’t even know, a lot of them I never saw the houses. So, but we won’t talk about that because you know, the divorce so, but.

Dylan Silver (26:27.994)
Cliff, we actually are coming up on time here. That flew by. That flew by. Where can folks go to get a hold of you?

bestmentor (26:29.3)
But,

bestmentor (26:40.251)
CliffG.me is my website. I have a little training course that I do on there. You can register for that. I do offer some additional training and stuff of the way that I actually do business. And I’ve been doing it for, like I said, going on, I don’t want to admit 35 years, but it works. It works every time. I have a method of how I do my offers.

I have a method of how I analyze the property. I’ve lost money on two deals in the entire time. And I hate to say it wasn’t my fault, but it wasn’t my fault. had a partner that said, I could do it better. Obviously not. But that’s how you can contact me is through cliffg.me. I also have cliffg at cliffg.me is my email address.

I’m available 24-7 on the website and look forward to helping more people. My big goal today is to help people not make mistakes. There’s a lot of information out there that some is good, some is not. I like the way you guys do the masterminds where you actually help each other, where you analyze what somebody’s doing and then the whole team goes together and

and helps come up with better solutions, that makes my day. I mean, to help people is my reason for being on this planet.

Dylan Silver (28:16.228)
Cliff, thank you so much for coming on the show.

bestmentor (28:19.306)
Thank you, I appreciate it and have a great day. Thanks Dylan.