Political Activism Meets Entrepreneurship: Transform Your Real Estate Game

John Harcar (00:01.147)
All right. Hey guys, welcome back to our show. I’m your host, John Harcar, and I’m here today with John Matland. And what we’re going to talk about besides his real estate journey is, you know, a little thing you guys might know called creative financing, you know, other ways to do deals in this difficult type of market. Guys, remember at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, really all real estate entrepreneurs, two to five extra business by

Really, give them the tools and resources to build the business they want to build and really generate the life that they want.

John, welcome to our show.

John Matland (00:37.346)
Thanks for having me.

John Harcar (00:38.661)
It’s so weird. Normally I look up and I see, you know, just keep it John John. They’re drawn to someone else. And say, John John, I’m excited to talk about creative financing. love creative financing. I think we’re both part of sub two. But before we kind of talk about that and why there’s such a need for that now, tell our audience about you and kind of your background, you know, how you got into real estate and really what got you here.

John Matland (01:01.858)
Yeah, my journey is definitely a strange one. I always try to keep things interesting and I’m not gonna fail with this one. after 18 years, 18 years in healthcare, I started right in high school summer, right in the file room back when there was actually files to be had. Now that doesn’t exist anymore. That’s the way of AI and the way of digital operations. But I started there, went to x-ray school.

John Harcar (01:09.296)
Let’s go.

John Harcar (01:21.525)
No.

John Matland (01:30.062)
By 21, I was a licensed X-ray tech and got my CAT scan license. And I was kind of in cruise control. I was on that nine to five life, or in my case, 4 p.m. to midnight, getting mandated till eight in the morning and wondering why I’ve chose this for myself. Finally got to the eight to four route, which was the pinnacle. And I said, have 10 years left before I have my full pension and I’ll only be 48 at that time.

John Harcar (01:43.751)
Hahaha

John Matland (01:56.614)
And a little thing came that you may have heard of called COVID-19 just the year before, so at my 14th year. And that is when they started saying, hey, if you’re gonna move forward, you’re needing to get, you need the jab or you’re not gonna do it. And I said, that’s not for me. So they put me out like a piece of garbage on the curb. So at that, that’s correct. So.

John Harcar (02:17.732)
Because he didn’t

John Matland (02:20.974)
There’s number one of saying how my path started to go toward real estate. It was about owning my own future, being my own boss. And if we want to talk about mitigation, it was mitigating the interference for my right to live and pursue a good lifestyle for myself. But on the way out, I decided to go run for US Congress. And then I took on my own party in that. So you can imagine it was as they can make movies about these things, but

John Harcar (02:50.575)
Yeah.

John Matland (02:51.342)
I was outspent by a million dollars in the primary. I only had around 48K to our campaign grassroots. It didn’t work out. I took 22 % of the vote. The incumbent stayed. And it was definitely a strange experience for all of Staten Island, New York at that point in Brooklyn, South Brooklyn. And then I thought my path honestly, John, was going to be

John Harcar (03:13.19)
No.

John Matland (03:18.488)
Politics, mean city council there was there was a district opening actually it opened this year thought that might be the route but I took a month vacation to Florida and I never wanted to leave we got an Airbnb and then I said maybe I should buy an Airbnb maybe I should move down here so Wifey and I who my wife was the one that was pushing me I had a politic radio show at the time She said hey start watching these pace morby videos

I was watching that, was watching Flip It with Rick, I was learning about cash, was learning all these different things. if you’ve ever heard of creative finance people, the first thing anybody that doesn’t know real estate, what they say is, is this legal? They don’t know about wraparound mortgages, they don’t know about these things. And I was one of those people, but I kept learning. Opened my LLC, JMKD Ventures LLC. Next thing I know, we bought a property here.

Then we bought a quadplex here. So now we got five doors under the belt and that was all traditional, but I was learning and learning and I partnered with Luxmore properties. That’s the team I’m with and we from there became super innovative in that space kept growing, wholesaling creative deals. And now.

Two years later, I am very much in real estate and I haven’t had a W-2 since August 18th of 2021, so the train keeps moving.

John Harcar (04:49.206)
Awesome. All right, let’s go back. If you ever watch any of my podcasts, I like to go back. I like to start back at beginning, okay, or some on specific times. Why Congress? Why politics? Why, you know, you’re an X-ray tech, you’re making good money. I’m assuming, you know, you’re 10, like you said, 10 years from your pension. Why go into Congress? I mean, I know you had the shot and you did the whole shot situation that you didn’t get, but why Congress?

John Matland (05:16.372)
It was watching in New York. So I mean, every state had a different approach and city. New York City went completely bananas. Couldn’t go into your local restaurant. You couldn’t go into the food court at the mall if you were unvaccinated. And that was right after the job, they took us, then they went for teachers, then they went for all the city workers. And I watched a lot of politicians play.

John Harcar (05:41.275)
Mm-hmm.

John Matland (05:43.608)
politics and that’s the thing I said I kept saying real people need to get into politics because When you have the people that want to just survive It’s kind of the cockroach mentality. It’s like I’ll do whatever I say I’ll talk out of both sides of my mouth as long as I get the votes to stay in I’m good and I didn’t care if I got in and never got back in it was never a career for me It was to disrupt a system that is just poisoned from both sides across the board

So it started, to answer your question, it started with, yeah, they took my job, now they’re taking everyone else’s job, but I saw a fear in all of these workers, these coworkers and community members that they didn’t know how to stand up for themselves. When you stay on the system too long and you’re comfortable there, you don’t know how to go against it and there’s something wrong with me and that’s called my entrepreneur spirit, that if you’re gonna take something from me, I will figure out how to build and come back.

That’s who I am. So I said, these people need representation in their fight. And that was just to get them to say no and feel comfortable and stay strong. And I got these large crowds together. The first one was at the Staten Island food court at the mall. They were banning us. I mean, I’ve told some people about this, but we had to have a two hour sit down with security from Brookfield Properties.

the NYPD, the chief officers of all the different precincts on Staten Island, and they said, don’t come and eat on Saturday, because that was what I had said. We’re gonna go eat on a Saturday afternoon, we’re gonna meet at noon, and if they want to arrest us for eating, go for it. Have at it. It’ll make the message stronger. Now, of course, my parents were really upset about that. were like, John, you’ve made it through 35 years of life, 36 years of life at this point.

John Harcar (07:29.945)
Right.

John Matland (07:38.006)
and now you’re risking getting arrested to go eat? And I said, that’s the problem. There’s so many people that say you’re risking getting arrested to go to eat when the right answer is go and eat, no one can arrest you. And I exposed that that day. And next thing I know, we’re on the Colbert show. They’re making fun of us for going to eat. And this spiral, John, it just kept, I kept getting a presence. So like my political world.

I have like the following on Instagram of over 38,000 followers on that. And that is just because I said no. And when they came for the sanitation workers, I was watching grown men on the verge of tears, not knowing how they were gonna have Thanksgiving day dinner with their family. And I said no. And a buddy of mine, they had shut his bar down. They seized his business called Max Public House. We both stood in front of garbage trucks that night to not let them out. I got zip tied and detained.

And my wife’s crying and everyone’s like what is happening in this world and a lot of people in the other states Don’t know about how bad it got Look yeah, I mean if you google my name, you’ll find some crazy things but now I just keep it low-key and I just wholesale and do real estate and Everyone prays I keep it that way and I don’t end up in DC, but god knows

John Harcar (08:41.156)
Yeah, I had no idea.

John Harcar (08:54.214)
Nice. So you’re you’re you’re vacationing in Florida. You don’t want to go back to the cold. Don’t blame you. You know, don’t don’t blame you on that. But you’re in an Airbnb and your wife says check out this piece more of your stuff. Why did you go out and find your first couple properties? What did you do?

John Matland (09:11.534)
Um, well with that, I joined what they have as the elephant challenge and the sub two community at that point that was in 2023, right? Yeah, sounds right. Yeah. So it was in 2023 and I started lightly working with the team from Colorado. They were like, Oh, come on, do some cold calling. Um, and apparently I was good at the cold calling thing. And the first day I got a very, very hot lead.

John Harcar (09:16.528)
Yep.

John Harcar (09:20.739)
That’s something like.

John Matland (09:38.478)
And they were like, if you don’t have your LLC set up, it’s time, because you might be getting paid really shortly. So I set it up. That deal fell through because of VA entitlement. But the next day, the next day I met the team I’m with still to this very day. So that was just as fate would have it. It’s been two years. Like I said, I quickly ascended to head of acquisitions. My wife became head of dispositions. I hope one day, Christie, is on your show, because I could acquire.

John Harcar (09:45.99)
bummer. Well, learning.

John Matland (10:08.002)
with the best of them, but I don’t know how to sell them. And if you, this is a business, everyone goes, well, what about acquisitions? Acquisitions don’t mean anything. Those are nice decorative napkins or docusigns you can hang on the wall. If you can’t assign that contract, you acquired nothing.

John Harcar (10:20.972)
You can’t sell it. It’s Yeah, it required time. It required someone else’s time and a piece of paper. That’s about it. Okay, so you kept joining some groups. What were some of your early struggles when you started getting into wholesaling and calling sellers and all those types of things?

John Matland (10:40.332)
Yeah, so I predominantly do direct to agent. I find agents are, for the most part now they know what’s going on. It’s the bad rep of sub two. And what I mean by that, it got very saturated. So when that happened, everybody was calling and now we have the same problem we just discussed. Napkins and signed contracts that mean nothing. So you call and you make a good offer.

John Harcar (10:44.111)
Okay.

John Matland (11:07.48)
and they say somebody’s offering me 30K more than that. And that 30K doesn’t make any sense. No one’s buying it if you’re overpricing a house by $30,000 and then you want an assignment fee on top. So it’s like, hey, buy this house sub two for an extra 40 to $50,000. No one’s interested in those, but that ties up real offers. that’s where that evolution came in. So what I had in the beginning as a problem was when

John Harcar (11:14.95)
next.

Right.

John Harcar (11:30.235)
Mm-hmm.

John Matland (11:37.44)
When it did go to the disposition phase, there’s a lot of people that claim to be buyers, but they’re just trying to figure out how they can be a buyer, how they can raise capital, and they tie you up or they don’t perform come closing. through different methods, we’ve rectified that. And the other thing is, I guess, survival. I guess that big rush of people making ridiculous offers or…

John Harcar (11:53.508)
Mm-hmm.

John Matland (12:04.652)
you know, just blanketing out letters of intent without any data, which skews everything. mean, I’m not a big fan of just putting out, here’s an offer. I don’t know anything about the house. And then all of sudden you’ve offered, again, 20K over and the agent’s like, yes, I’ll take that. Now, how are they gonna take you serious on the flip side? So.

John Harcar (12:10.512)
Sure.

John Harcar (12:24.486)
Discounts legitimate offers. I mean, I get it. It happened to me a hundred times. What are some of the things you attribute your success to in acquisitions?

John Matland (12:40.962)
Being innovative. So I designed a contract with my team. I pulled all these levers and this is like the madness of my brain. Like I said, if something goes wrong, I’m gonna find a way to build a bridge around it. It might not make the most sense the way I design it sometimes, but that’s what lawyers are for. They came in and hammered out some of the details on how to execute what goes on in my wild brain. And…

I started doing everything I do on an option contract and it has a lot of flexibility and being that I’m direct to agent, it gives the agent the ability to still sell the house traditionally. And what I’m really leveraging is the market is not really allowing for the house to sell traditionally. So I’m giving this gift of, you can still sell it. I’ve had all the time I’ve been doing this.

I tied once, so my first right of refusal overrides that. And the other time they got a veteran that wanted to move in using their VA loan. was in a military town and I just signed the release. said, don’t worry, I’m not gonna match it. I’m not gonna purchase at my terms. Go for it. You sold your house, I’m happy for you. But generally where we’re at is the market. If somebody’s willing to go and look at creative finance, that means, hey, it’s not selling.

John Harcar (13:51.716)
Right.

John Matland (14:02.126)
And they just want a second way out. So if I could 2X the chance of their house selling with all my little bells and whistles that I’ve included, for them, it’s an easy take. And it’s honesty. It’s just transparency. As direct to agent, we wholesalers, and I hate the word wholesaling because it makes it sound really, really bad. I tell them you can call it wholesaling because in theory, that’s what it is. But I work on an assignment fee. I’m going to assign this for a fee that

John Harcar (14:25.862)
Mm-hmm.

John Matland (14:31.34)
my investor is going to pay. That sounds so much better. It’s the same

John Harcar (14:35.459)
I’m a consultant for my investors, know, I, yeah.

John Matland (14:40.13)
Yeah, so that’s where I overcame many obstacles and I call it Wholesaling 2.0. You gotta be transparent. You gotta be innovative. I JV now. I do joint ventures across the country. I have wholesalers that have been doing it for years calling me and they’re still trying to get the pitch right or they’ve learned it now from me. But we just JV on everything because we Dispo at Luxmore. It’s a luxmordeals.com. We Dispo.

Wholesalers deals from around the country some of them are on our proprietary contract, so they have 90 days I often go and tell people if you want to know the power of the option contract I turned a house that has negative $1,200 as cash flow I turned that into a $20,000 assignment fee it took 80 days But I did and when I offered the agent that I did two things John. I said hey

I want to do a sub 2 on this and they said you can’t do a sub 2 on it. It’s an unsub 2 of a property. It’s so bad. It doesn’t cash flow. I said, don’t worry about it. Let me try day 50 came. I called the agent and I said, Hey, you know the 80,000 hybrid seller carry portion. Do they want to get rid of that and sell the house? Cause I think I can make it move. And she said, are you crazy? I said, it’s up to you. You don’t have to sign an addendum. Let me know.

John Harcar (16:00.135)
Right.

John Matland (16:01.166)
Calls me back five minutes later, send the addendum. So now we just cut 80K off the purchase price. Now it’s more in the realm of reality. Day 80 comes and next thing I know we have a $20,000 assignment fee because a wholesaler themselves wanted to move in as a homestead. So couldn’t wholesale that in a million years. Like there would be less than a 1 % of a 1 % chance, but being innovative made that happen.

John Harcar (16:07.216)
Sure.

John Harcar (16:26.15)
I love it. So let’s talk about your business now. I know we talked a little bit about right before we got on about the creative financing and whatnot. Kind of that’s how things are going with this type of market. So tell me what your business looks like now outside of, I don’t know if you’re doing something separate from Luxmore, but tell me about that and let’s talk about creative.

John Matland (16:44.172)
Yeah, right now Luxmoor is my predominant stuff. I have Buy and Hold, is the other, you know, we got a condo in Boca Raton and we always envisioned after we would move out of it that we would say, hey, this is gonna be a great rental at that point, because we wanted to get to Florida, we fell in love, we got down here. And that condo is great, it’s right outside of FAU, first floor.

There’s no rental restrictions. a very renter friendly HOA. Majority of units are investors that own it and perfect for kids going to college. You walk out into your Florida room, you walk out the door and you’re five minutes from campus on foot. You just cross over the river. yeah, once we walked in, we knew this is going to be an amazing return. Even though it’s a condo in Florida and the condo market’s going through its own thing. We knew that this is, this is

Prime real estate. So that was the beginning. That was like the ultimate beginning of the real real estate journey. The quadplex, another thing that’s gonna just continue to grow in Lake Worth Beach. This whole area is growing up to be something spectacular. Some people say three to five years, it’s gonna be the next Delray. It’s gonna be something where a lot of people go. And what I call it is, I call it Staten Island. And the reason I call it that,

is Manhattan is West Palm Beach. It’s growing every day massively and we’re 12, 15 minutes away. So we’re that outside borough. And when people don’t want to live like, I don’t want to live in the hustle bustle of West Palm, they can rent here. that was my goal there for the buy-in holds. And we’re still looking to develop that. mean, making

John Harcar (18:20.4)
Don’t want to live in the middle of all the hectic.

John Matland (18:33.806)
proper, again, it comes down to underwriting, underwriting, underwriting, making the proper investment where at the end you’re saying, okay, I’m making money. If you do single family homes, sometimes people like at the end, I’m clearing $300, it’s close and you’re just worried about the building equity. But if you make the right moves, we found the quadplex off market before it got listed. We have really good agents down here. I’ll shout them out, Kevin and Nicole West from Compass.

have a lot of connections. They reached out to a multifamily guy and he said, I have one that I’m going to list on Monday. That was like the week before. So he had like five, six days to make an offer. And we walked the property and I’m like, man, like if we could hit the seller, he bought that house when it was about to be condemned. He rebuilt it, redid everything to it. It’s two structures. So four units altogether.

John Harcar (19:13.755)
Mmm.

John Matland (19:31.774)
And he had that opportunity that he got it for like $50,000 flipped it and he was able to sell it. So he didn’t care if he took a haircut because he was making hundreds and hundreds of that. And he was doing a 1031 exchange on it. So he wanted to sell quick because he had his next piece of real estate. So we came in, we got it. And it’s kind of like we got it from 200,000 under market. So it was just a big, big win across the board.

John Harcar (19:41.324)
He was still making a huge prayer.

John Harcar (20:00.008)
Mmm. Sounds like it. Sounds like it.

John Matland (20:01.662)
and I think for all parties. So that’s on the buy and hold front.

John Harcar (20:07.458)
Awesome. So what’s holding you back from buying more? nice. Cool. If anybody has more properties in, where was that? Lake Worth Beach? Reach out to this gentleman. What advice for someone getting into wanting to start wholesaling, start doing, what advice do you give them? First thing they need to do, hands down.

John Matland (20:10.41)
Nothing that’s next on the agenda. It’s more about

John Matland (20:18.776)
You think we’re beat? Yeah.

John Matland (20:33.262)
Don’t give up. Ask yourself why you’re doing it. Ask yourself what your dedication is. So I would say end of 23, I was only in this now, let’s say for five months, right? And I started taking on students, teaching them free of charge, just wanting them to work with us. We’d give them leads, just make your calls. And that program, I basically called it off within four or five months because the turnover was so high. Everyone was coming in saying,

I’m ready, I’m ready to do this. And I told everyone, if you call daily, you will have a deal within the first three months, at least one deal, and it will compound that your other deals will come back around. The really good callers were getting that, but they would only stay till they made that first deal. And they said it’s not worth it. And they were ducking out. So it’s really what you’re looking to get from it. Are you willing to give it time to…

but for the seeds to germinate and to learn more and to get more or to start your own business or make strategic partnerships, you need to take that moment and look inside your soul. If you think you’re driving a Lamborghini or something, that’s not gonna happen, not right away at least. I can tell you I’m making a lot more now than I was in the beginning. And that was, the beginning was tough. My first six months, even though I was teaching people, it was tough. It was touch and go and I was like, man,

I could really go for maybe an x-ray job right now. I got close to thinking about it a few times. And it was, but now that’s different. And that’s, you have to survive, adapt and innovate. And that’s what I tell everybody. Don’t get in and think that you have one script and that’s it. And you’re going to make a million dollars. It’s tough. And if you want to scale, you’re going to have to kind of take ownership and build as well.

John Harcar (22:02.918)
Yeah

John Harcar (22:25.414)
Yeah, yeah. And it’s about learning and always growing, right? And always finding that room, those people, person that is where you’re at and learning from their mistakes and having them help accelerate your learning. So networking, yep, 100%. If, go ahead.

John Matland (22:41.014)
Networking, networking, John. you, no, if you get into this and you’re not networking, it’s not gonna work. You want solid advice. Every time, and my wife again, I give her all the credit, she’s the master of networking. She literally just flies around the room like a butterfly and knows everybody by the end. And I’m kinda like.

John Harcar (22:52.282)
But, yep.

John Matland (23:08.14)
Wish I could network as good as you, but networking is the key, because you’re not just going to make a… It’s like a tree falling in the forest and no one’s there to hear it. If you don’t network, you’re not making the connections to make deals.

John Harcar (23:22.426)
Yeah, 100%. I love it. Well, John, thank you for coming on here and sharing the info, bro. Some good stuff. Guys, I hope you’re out there listening, took some notes. If they wanna talk a little bit more with you, they might be in your area and have some deals. They might want to work with Luxmoor. How do they reach out and how do they get in touch with you?

John Matland (23:42.732)
Yeah, I’m active now on the social. So Instagram and TikTok, it’s the underscore closer underscore Johnny, the closer Johnny with underscores in between it. You can send me direct messages. I’m John Matland on Facebook. You might run into John Matland for Congress if you search a lot of different versions of me, but find the real estate one.

And yes, I work with everybody that’s serious that wants to do it. If you’re already doing deals, we will dispo it. If you want to use our contract, we will dispo it. We’re, we’re awesome to work.

John Harcar (24:15.697)
I love that, I love that. Guys, use him. Get as much information out of him if you need it. But like what he said is, just take action too, right? Know what you’re gonna do and take action. Don’t send the sidelines. Hope you guys had a good show. I did it as well. John, thank you again and we’ll see you guys on the next.

John Matland (24:36.61)
Later.