Network Like a Pro: How to Build Connections in Real Estate Investments

John Harcar (00:01.686)
Okay, hey guys, welcome back to our show. I’m your host, John Harcar, and I’m here today with Austin Evans and Josh Rosenfeld. And what we’re gonna talk about is, you not only their journey in real estate and in business, but we’re gonna talk about some really cool of how they’re creating homeowners. Remember guys, at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, I mean, really all real estate entrepreneurs, two to five X their business.

Austin Evans (00:12.582)
in business.

John Harcar (00:28.448)
We provide the tools and resources necessary to grow the business they’re looking to grow, which in turn helps them live the life that they want to live. Guys, welcome to our show.

Josh Rosenfeld (00:31.31)
Thank

Austin Evans (00:36.838)
Thank you John, thanks for having us

Josh Rosenfeld (00:39.633)
Thank you, John.

John Harcar (00:41.076)
I’m excited to talk about how you guys create homeowners. I love when people are really looking to go help and provide for the community. But before we get into all that, and I guess we’ll start with you Austin and then we’ll move to Josh, tell us a little bit about your background. How’d you get into business, real estate, and what got you to today?

Austin Evans (00:50.341)
that you to be often charged.

Austin Evans (01:00.903)
Yeah, it’s a good story and it’ll it’ll it’ll lead up nice with Josh too when he goes when he goes over to him so Basically Long story short like I actually grew up in real estate like my dad He is a he’s a licensed realtor commercially residentially He’s an appraiser property manager and kind of like a mom-and-pop Investor as well. He maybe does like one flip every other year and you know has some rentals so but I

Josh Rosenfeld (01:05.355)
Hehehehehe

John Harcar (01:06.485)
Hahaha.

Josh Rosenfeld (01:29.239)
Yeah.

Austin Evans (01:30.083)
I never want to be like my dad though, right? Like people don’t know you’re gonna be like your dad I’m like no no no and you know went to college and you know was trying to do like the marketing stuff and quickly realized that college Was full of crap to a large degree and realized I was gonna be in sales anyways came back Started doing you know variety of sales presentation sales credit card sales ran a landscaping business and then I got in to door-to-door sales, which is where I met Josh actually and

Josh Rosenfeld (01:38.381)
Thank you.

Austin Evans (01:59.014)
Long story short, when I got into door-to-door, I was in Denver. I was selling pass control door-to-door and somehow I got in contact with Little Pink Houses, the company, and they were like, have you ever thought about doing real estate? And I was like, no, I don’t want to be a realtor. They’re like, no, no, no, I’m not talking about being a realtor. I’m talking about buying and selling real estate as an investor. And I was like, I’ve never really thought about it. And got into it and I decided to jump into it.

Josh Rosenfeld (02:11.653)
Okay.

Austin Evans (02:27.878)
It was an affiliation, so joined their mentorship affiliation in North Carolina. And yeah, I started doing that. was with them for about six years. that’s how it all started. It’s kind of snowball affected from there.

Josh Rosenfeld (02:37.932)
Okay.

John Harcar (02:44.34)
Nice. And Josh, we’ll get to you in a second, but real fast, Austin, and I get interested about this kind of thing, especially when someone grew up around real estate, they grew up and they’ve seen it. Why did you not want to do it? If you saw your pops were successful and doing all this stuff, why was it something you didn’t think you wanted to do?

Austin Evans (03:03.93)
Well, on a more personal note, mean, I think a big part of it is that my parents went through a really bad divorce when I was like middle school and high school and I had a lot of resentment for my dad. So that definitely had a big part of it. was like, you know, kind of like, you know, screw you mentality towards my dad. Unfortunately, thankfully we’re on great terms now, like never better. So that’s that’s a positive spin on it. But that was a big part of it. I would say the second part of it was that

Josh Rosenfeld (03:04.268)
I’m

Austin Evans (03:33.028)
Like I didn’t fully understand. Like I understood some things from my dad. I would help them as young as like 12 years old answering phones, doing, you know, like Excel spreadsheets, meeting people at, you know, homes to show them the properties. The real estate association doesn’t know that though, officially. Off the record. But yeah, so, but yeah, I didn’t understand the level or the depth.

Josh Rosenfeld (03:34.428)
Okay.

John Harcar (03:51.606)
You

off the record.

Austin Evans (03:59.365)
Even my dad did. Even when I started really getting into the investor side heavily, my dad has come to me like, what do you think about this? Or do you have an idea about this? So it’s kind of transformed into that. But that’s the big reason why.

John Harcar (04:09.524)
Awesome.

John Harcar (04:14.038)
Is hindsight 2020? You wish you would have gotten this a while back?

Austin Evans (04:17.966)
I mean, look, I don’t regret any of things I’ve gone through because like, you know, the door like the door to door sales and all these different like odd jobs and things that I did, even though a lot of them I didn’t make any money with, like they helped me be who I am right now. Right. So I so and it also helped me meet Josh. So, yeah, I don’t regret any of it. You know, but yeah, I mean, look, if I could have been a kid buying properties in 2008.

John Harcar (04:34.963)
Nice.

Josh Rosenfeld (04:43.595)
Yes, sir. So I met Austin, like you said, on a cruise trip, actually, for door to door. So I grew up at the beach and for growing up, always going to do something big.

Austin Evans (04:45.476)
You know, that would have been great. Right, right.

John Harcar (04:47.328)
Sure, sure, Yeah, we all wish we were back then buying properties. Well, cool, man. Great story, Josh. You’re up.

Josh Rosenfeld (05:11.209)
Really wasn’t quite sure when I was younger. I’ve already to just only cared about today instead of three, five, seven years down the

Josh Rosenfeld(05:23.626)
for me whenever I found the door to the company that we started working with.

Josh Rosenfeld(05:32.188)
Austin said he was doing real estate and this is whenever he was first getting into with me. We were in an Uber on the way back after hanging out on the cruise and I said, hey, do you got anything I could take? Like, let me come work with you. It just so happened he had to have a little, like the manual, the training manual that Pink used to have. He gave it to me and I did my first summer at door to door.

kept in contact with Austin. I read that thing religiously. I read that manual over and over and over because I wasn’t going to let the opportunity slip just to get my foot into the door and came back from first summer. went down to Jacksonville. We had our training first couple weeks. I was initially a cold collar for me. Let me tell you what the first couple of days I was probably some of the worst days of my life as far as getting my teeth kicked in.

John Harcar (06:20.778)
Ha

yeah.

Josh Rosenfeld (06:23.823)
But I knew I wasn’t going to falter easy. So I eventually got the hang of it. I think in one month with our lease to own program that me and Austin specialize right now, I got 25 lease to own properties in my second month working with Austin and just kind of took off from there as far as learning wholesaling, buying, flipping, holding on yards as far as what we do.

Austin Evans (06:23.876)
Okay.

John Harcar (06:41.568)
Awesome.

Josh Rosenfeld (06:51.259)
grew into a role where we have Mint Start Home Solutions right now and me and him, we just want to take over the Carolinas and help other people get into homes like you said, with creating home ownership and just helping out people in real estate. Rather if it’s our affiliates now or future affiliates. I wish I had somebody like myself or like Austin when I first got into this that generally say, here’s my hand first, how can I help? We’ll figure it out later.

Austin Evans (07:07.524)
Okay.

Josh Rosenfeld (07:21.027)
like we’re doing with our affiliates right now. And it’s just the right thing to do. If you do business the right way, you connect dots and do it the right way, it’ll come back.

John Harcar (07:21.302)
Mmm.

Right. Yeah.

John Harcar (07:32.918)
100%. 100%. Was there any real estate influence in your life prior or you just saw your buddy doing some real estate and you thought you’d join?

Josh Rosenfeld (07:43.482)
I saw my buddy doing real estate. I knew this was my foot in the door and I just, I wasn’t faltering and I wasn’t failing and I wasn’t going down. Cause I knew if I didn’t take advantage of this opportunity, I would probably go back to being homeless or just knocking doors on, knocking doors for a living. So I wasn’t faltering.

John Harcar (07:54.431)
I love the mindset.

John Harcar (08:05.35)
Awesome awesome. All right, so we bring it all together. You guys are working together. How long does it take to get the first deal?

Austin Evans (08:13.571)
So the first deal that we did how long did it take? Well, I’ll the funniest funniest thing I’ll just a little little background So Josh said he’s been working for about six years the first year. I joined pink though. didn’t have Josh yet You know, and I just admit I just had met him but like we hadn’t started or anything So the first year I didn’t make any money. They make any money now suit to background that I was also

not working at full time. I kind of was like kicking it around because I was still doing door-to-door sales. I was a sales manager recruiting guys, training guys. And then I also was involved with another campaigning business that I was involved in. So I wasn’t taking it fully serious. And we got back from that summer. Josh, he was trained at that point. And I got back and I was like, you know what? I got to lock in.

Like I’ve invested money, invested time in this, like I can’t just make this like a part-time hobby. I gotta fully lock in and make this my full-time thing. I refuse to lose any money, because I invested 25 grand on this like mentorship and affiliation kind of franchise thing. So I was like, I’m not gonna lose that money. we locked in mid, late October. Yeah, like Josh said, we had,

Within a two month or so period, had like 25 to 30 lease to own properties under agreement, which that’s all we did back then. And so, yeah, we had our first deal come through and made a profit on it probably within like two months. Yeah, so, you know, not too, too long.

@josh_closed_it (09:40.621)
to

John Harcar (09:55.231)
Nice.

John Harcar (09:59.287)
Okay. What do you guys think?

Austin Evans (10:00.402)
After that year of struggling.

John Harcar (10:03.254)
Okay, and that’s what I want to talk about. Like as you guys started, what were some of the bigger struggles you had to overcome?

Austin Evans (10:10.657)
I mean, think some of the big struggles to overcome were really grasping. think anyone in real estate, I don’t think until you really get into it, you fully grasp like, this is someone’s home. This is their biggest asset. They probably own or will ever own and treating it as such. You can’t treat it the same as like a car or pest control or a satellite dish. So there’s that level of understanding, like the seriousness, the

Like how you hold yourself up when you’re presenting yourself to people, talking with people, respecting their time. So think that was part of it. There was maybe a little bit of the nerves of kind of getting started and getting comfortable talking to people about your home. And also our age, I like, I’m 28 right now, Josh is 27. So when we started, we were 22 years old. And so people also looking at like, who are you? Or like, what do you know?

You know, so there was also that age factor, you know, that also, like still to this day a little bit, like, you know, but we didn’t let it phase us, right? We were just like, okay, like we have to work harder. We have to be on our A game to prove people like, hey, even though we’re young, like we know what we’re talking about. We’re not stupid, you know, so.

John Harcar (11:27.126)
Right, right, right, right. Yeah, I know, and that’s a lot of things people run into, especially when they’re young. You got someone who’s older coming in, or saying, what do you know about selling properties or buying properties? Or do you even have the money? You’re 20 something, do you have the money? All right, so before we talk about kind how you guys create homeowners, tell us, what does your business look like today? Where do you operate? How many deals are you doing? What’s your lead gen look like? Just kind of give us a quick little rundown.

Austin Evans (11:39.4)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Austin Evans (11:53.394)
Okay, so basically two parts to our business. One part of the company is just Josh and I, and we have a cold caller that’s local. That’s just in the Carolinas. Josh lives at Myrtle Beach. I live in New Bern, North Carolina. And so we do all our deals ourselves. So that could be a variety of deals. It could be fixing flips, buying holds, developing new construction.

You name it, we’re kind of touching on it, we’re dabbling in it. So that’s one part of it. How we’re generating leads, the wild thing, I tell people this, and some people it’s not wild, but I would say more people, it’s a little mind boggling. They’re like, oh, what’s your marketing budget? like, I don’t like zero. They’re like, what? What do you mean zero? And I was like, oh, know, like zero. I don’t know, I don’t have a PPC plan going.

I’m not dropping mail. I’m not spending thousands and thousands of dollars. I pay a social media manager 200 bucks if you want to count that. they’re not really dry. All the cold callers we’ve ever had have always been commissioned. So we don’t pay an hourly or monthly salary. I’m not saying that’s perfect. I’m not saying there’s not pros and cons to what we’re doing.

John Harcar (13:00.246)
Do you pay the cold caller?

Josh Rosenfeld (13:03.863)
mission.

Austin Evans (13:16.894)
What we’ve done, what we’ve always have done is just kind of squeezed as much out of free sources as possible, knocking doors, driving for dollars, know, picking up, you know, leads here and there from free sources and skip tracing them and calling them. And most of our leads now, I will say it took several years of like getting our foot out there, people getting to know us, but it’s referral, it’s network like real estate agents.

other wholesalers, other investors. They’re like, go to Austin, go to Josh. They know what they’re doing. They can help you out. They know somebody that can fix that issue. So that’s most of our deals. We wake up, there’s probably a deal in our inbox. Somehow, some way. So that’s a great thing. Now, there you go. There’s one 20 minutes ago. So that’s a great thing. Again.

Josh Rosenfeld (14:05.633)
There was one in my 20 minutes ago.

John Harcar (14:09.693)
Nice.

Austin Evans (14:12.68)
There are some negatives to that. can be complete. We can be complacent sitting back. OK, we’re not going to be aggressive on acquisitions now because people are sending things to us. But, you know, there’s a lot of great to it as well. So that’s that. And the second part of the business is our affiliation. Right. So we have affiliates that are kind of like affiliate slash JV partners. They work in certain areas. They have to be local because we like people to have that local feel. You know, we I want.

John Harcar (14:39.275)
Mm-hmm.

Austin Evans (14:41.116)
that person who’s talking to John about his home, he knows where that McDonald’s is. He knows where that church is. And I think that makes a big difference. I’m not saying it’s necessary or you have to do it that way, but I think there’s so many people that are getting spam called by people all over the world, all over the place. And it’s kind of like white noise. And I’m like, how do we stand out? Well, we’re local. Or we have someone that is local. They know that area. They have that accent.

You know, and that makes a big difference, I think. And so that’s kind of our approach. And even with our affiliates and we train them, we coach them, we mentor them, we hold their hand, you know, through whatever they need on a weekly daily basis on all types of deals. And so that’s the other part. That’s the other part of the business. And we’re trying to replicate what we do with them, you know, be heavy network, be heavy referral. You need to buy leads, you know.

John Harcar (15:11.349)
Right.

Austin Evans (15:36.539)
We talk about affordable ways of doing that instead of spending maybe five, ten, fifteen thousand dollars. know, again, nothing against people that are doing that. We’re just, you know, we try to stray away from that if we can.

John Harcar (15:42.645)
Great.

John Harcar (15:49.558)
Got it. Okay, cool. Well, let’s talk about our topic or what we mentioned, you know, creating homeowners, right? How are you guys doing that?

Austin Evans (15:56.669)
Yeah, so like I said, the company we were with, Pink Houses, that’s all they did, right? It was just this lease. They called it the Executive Lease Purchase Program. We call ours the Signature Lease Purchase Program. And it was all about just getting with homeowners that were stuck, they couldn’t sell their homes, maybe with an agent, whatever. It was like, can you afford to sell your home with a little bit of flexibility? We can help someone buy. And we would find somebody. We vet them, of course.

You know, look at three years of tax returns, three years of pay stubs, bank statements, credit history, background check, know, previous evictions. So we do a thorough workup on these people. We don’t just grab someone off the street and say, OK, here you go. You know, and that’s what makes us a little bit different, I would say, versus the standard rent to own. Nothing against it. Some people, you know, that’s their business model. But we are very intentional. Like we don’t want to just throw somebody random in there just because we can make money off of them.

John Harcar (16:40.214)
Right?

Austin Evans (16:54.972)
We want to make sure like, hey, you actually have a legit chance to get in this home with our help within a one year period. And those are who we’re focusing on to intentionally make them a homeowner. So that’s a big thing. So there’s credit repair. There’s maybe fixing their tax returns. There’s obviously getting into maybe adjusting something because they went through a foreclosure.

John Harcar (16:55.19)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (17:10.016)
Okay.

Austin Evans (17:21.392)
Bankruptcy, mean we’ve seen it all John. We’ve seen it all. I mean after doing it for seven years. So yeah, not just me right takes a village takes a village. But yeah, I mean we have a team You know that specializes in credit repair specializes in getting things removed from collection specializes in understanding how to overcome the you know identity theft the foreclosure the bankruptcy and then we have really good lenders that work with us.

John Harcar (17:24.638)
And this is stuff you help them fix?

John Harcar (17:30.294)
Well, of course, yeah.

Austin Evans (17:49.295)
You know in conjunction kind of build a plan and hold them accountable and you know Walk them across the finish line and that’s why our typical Timeline for these people that we move forward with is usually six to twelve months, which is again is a lot faster You know then like, know, let’s say a standard rent to own somebody what he’s expecting 24 to 36 months, right just to throw that out there So that’s where we’re a little bit different

Shorter timeline, that’s because we’re more picky about who we work with and we’re a lot more handholding, a lot more intentional behind what we’re doing with the people to get them in the best loan possible. mean, we’re trying to get them, that’s what some people are like, are you gonna steer me into a wrong loan? No, we’re trying to get you the best interest rate, the best loan possible for that property. That’s our intent. That’s what we’re promising to do with you. Obviously, you have to put in some effort, but.

We’re going to do most of the heavy lifting for you. So, know, and we’ve done that, like I said, with some people that just don’t want to sell traditionally, tired landlords. We’ve done that with fixing flippers. Sometimes, A, they want to make more money, save money, you know, on the short term capital gains or whatnot. Or maybe they just couldn’t sell. We’ve had a lot of flippers like, hey, I can’t sell it. Maybe I over invested in it. OK, bring it in. Let’s see what we can do to help you.

John Harcar (18:45.771)
Hmm.

John Harcar (18:59.871)
Right.

Austin Evans (19:10.303)
limit your loss, maybe actually still be in the positive side. yeah, we’ve done a lot. We’ve done a lot on that end. But that’s the main intent behind it.

John Harcar (19:20.488)
And how do you guys get paid on that? Like, how does that figure out?

Austin Evans (19:22.903)
Yeah, so that’s it.

John Harcar (19:40.394)
down payment.

Austin Evans (19:49.113)
So they’re getting full credit for that. But we do factor that in, right? Like a spread factor, right? Between the seller, if there is one, it’s not just us, and then what they’re buying it for. So we take that up front. That’s one way we get paid. Secondly, if there’s money on the spread, we didn’t get up front, we could get that on the back end when they get their permanent financing, right? That’s number two. Three, we can make cash flow, right? If the debt obligation for us or

John Harcar (20:12.277)
Right.

John Harcar (20:16.694)
Ahem.

Austin Evans (20:18.404)
The homeowner we’re selling the property for is $1,400 and we’re getting $1,800. Okay, well, we can keep that difference. We don’t have to. We can give it. Sometimes we do because we’re generous. you know, that’s another way. The last way we sometimes could take the first or the last month payment, you know, as well. So taking a full payment upfront or on the back end. It’s all negotiable. But yeah, those are the four main ways we can make money on them.

John Harcar (20:38.934)
Ahem.

John Harcar (20:46.144)
That’s cool. Yeah, I used to know it as a sandwich lease option. Make money on the front, in the middle, and in the back as well. well, that’s awesome, man. I mean, guys sound like you got a great business going. Looks like we lost Josh a few minutes ago, unfortunately. But if there’s folks that are listening to this, and that type of business model intrigues them, or they want to be an affiliate, and they want to learn from you, how will people, or how can people get a hold of you?

Austin Evans (20:48.812)
Mm-hmm, yeah.

Yeah.

Austin Evans (21:11.789)
So, a great question, John. So they can get a hold of us at my phone number. It’s just 252-375-7524. It’s my personal, it’s my work, it’s my everything phone number. email is austin at minstarthomesolutions.com. So you can reach out to us on either one and we can talk about whether you wanna work with us or potentially you’re interested in being an affiliate.

John Harcar (21:22.806)
Bright.

John Harcar (21:38.187)
All right, cool. And we’ll put all that stuff in the show notes. Austin, I really appreciate you coming on. Tell Josh I said thank you as well. I’m sorry we couldn’t. He didn’t stay on the whole time. Guys, if you got any good tips or any good notes, reach out to him and talk to him about his business. And maybe he might be the one to get you into the game. Austin, thank you again. Guys, hope you had a good time. We’ll see you on the next one. Cheers.

Austin Evans (21:39.835)
notes.

Austin Evans (21:47.956)
If you got any tips.