Real Estate Unlocked

Christian (00:01.795)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. I have Brandon here with me and today we’re going to talk about everything from his experience of flipping over 500 houses in the Atlanta market. He owns a private lending business and is currently building 115,000 square foot self storage facility. Ton of experience here guys. And I’m really excited to dive into this one with Brandon. But before we get into that,

At Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, and real estate entrepreneurs, 2 5X their businesses to allow them to build the businesses they’ve always wanted and to allow them to live the lives they’ve always dreamed of. Brandon, welcome to the show. I’m excited to get going here. So before we get started, how about you just share a little bit about yourself to the audience and just how you got here.

Brandon Rickman (00:44.206)
Thanks, Christian. Appreciate it.

Brandon Rickman (00:51.02)
Yeah, so I am based in Atlanta, grew up just outside of Atlanta in Marietta, Georgia. And my dad was a builder. So growing up, learned how to do construction and was always on job sites, working and cleaning and, you know, doing stuff as a kid. So I kind of grew up in real estate and construction. After college, started a siding business and we sold.

party board and vinyl siding and stuff like that to other builders around the southeast. And then flipped a few houses, kind of small scale, a couple of houses a year, bought some rentals, did some renovating, stuff like that. then eventually, I actually had a company that I sold and one of the investors was a real estate investor and asked me if I would come work with him and help him build his acquisitions team.

And so I did. during that year and half that I was there, I kind of got a vision for like big scale investing. He was flipping a hundred houses a year, over a hundred houses a year in the Atlanta market. And I helped him build that business. And so then when I left, I had a bigger vision, a bigger idea of what was possible. And so really since about 2018, I’ve been full time flipping, doing some wholesaling. And then like you said, now I have a private lending business and am also building a self storage facility.

Christian (02:13.933)
Wow, that’s incredible. I appreciate you sharing your experience, Brandon. sounds like you’ve came a long way since the beginning. And I think that’s the beauty in the process, right? It’s how you start and where you are now. takes a lot of time. I think some people really get into this business for the wrong reasons, right? They want immediate gratification results. And it’s like, you have to put your reps in, especially in this game of real estate. And it’s a relationship business, ultimately, right? I mean, the relationships and the people that

Brandon Rickman (02:39.522)
Yeah, absolutely.

Christian (02:41.697)
you connect with, know, those are your lifeline, right? So how, how do you value your relationships? How do you use that as leverage to, know, to increase your business to where you’ve had it now?

Brandon Rickman (03:03.15)
Sorry, I lost the last part of that, Christian.

Christian (03:05.482)
No worries, Brandon. by VA edits this so we can just go back and we can just start off like we were just talking. But Brandon, how do you use relationships in your business? Right? How do you utilize that to your best resource?

Brandon Rickman (03:18.616)
Yeah, I mean, think relationships are key in any business and certainly in the real estate world. We have a house that we just listed a few days ago that it came through a relationship. it was a agent, real estate agent who knew that we were in the market. They had a house listed for 420 and then they dropped it to 375 and 365 and 355. It needed some work and they knew that we were in the flipping business and I knew that we would close and they could count on us. And so we ended up buying the house from them.

And it was all because of the relationship we had with that agent who had experience and knew that we would do what we said we’re going to do. And I think that’s really key to it, you know, in building relationships with people is do what you say you’re going to do. It seems like a very simple rule, but you’d be surprised how many people over promise and under deliver. And I find that it’s much easier just to be honest upfront and be truthful and say, here’s what we can do. And in that particular case.

When they first called me, I said, we can pay 300,000. And they said, well, we’re asking, you know, 375. I said, I understand. It doesn’t work for me. I can’t do it. I can do it at 300. And they came back four or five times as they dropped their price. So eventually I bought it for 300, but I closed and I paid cash and closed on time and did, did what we said we were going to do. So I think, you know, being willing to, to be honest upfront and do what you say you’re going to do. And obviously investing in relationships is key to any business and being successful.

Christian (04:44.429)
could not agree anymore. So Brandon, I’m really interested to hear on your flipping side of the business that you were mentioning, how are you managing that? I mean, you sound like you have a lot of flips going on at once. So what type of systems, what type of procedures, operations do you have in place to be able to manage that?

Brandon Rickman (05:02.35)
Yeah, I mean, it’s much grander scale than myself. Obviously, we have a lot of systems and processes in place. We, I’m a licensed general contractor, commercial and residential. So that helps, although I don’t actually do the work myself. We usually subcontract most of the stuff out, but over the years we’ve developed third party teams that do all of our work for us. So we have go-to plumbers, go-to electricians, painters.

framers, roofers, whoever we need. And it’s been a process of elimination really, because again, people will tell you they can be there on a certain day and then they don’t show up. They want to come back and change the price. They don’t perform at the quality we want them to. But now over doing this for many years, we’ve found really good subcontractors that we can use. And that’s a key to turning out flips on time and on budget is working with qualified contractors that you.

know we’re gonna do a good job, they know what you expect. And I always go and walk a house at the finish and do a punch list myself because I want that contractor to know this is the level of quality that I expect from you and if you’re not gonna deliver on that on time and on budget, then we’ll go find someone else. So contractors are key. We have agents on staff, real estate agents who can list the property for us. My wife is an agent as well, so we are constantly looking at the MLS and the FMLS.

And then we have a CRM, customer relationship management software that we use, actually several of them, so that we can keep up with leads as they come in. We do a lot of outbound marketing. So we do direct mail. Most of the properties that we buy are off market. And so that means they’re not listed on the MLS or FMLS in the Atlanta area. we’re doing a lot of direct mail. We’re doing paper click or paper lead. We’re doing cold calling. We’re doing texting.

So a lot of different ways that we’re marketing to find off-market properties. And then those potential sellers call us and we have an acquisition manager who will take those calls and determine is this a property that we might be able to buy. And they’re doing constant follow-up through that CRM, looking back at people we talked to last week and last month and last year, constantly following up with them to negotiate, go out and look at the property and then negotiate a price with them.

Brandon Rickman (07:27.918)
And then we use some call software. So we use CallRail or smartphone, which are both call tracking systems so that we can listen to calls that came in, especially if our acquisition people are on the road and they take a call on the road and they’re not sitting in front of their computer taking notes. They can go back through CallRail and smartphone and listen to those recorded calls and see what

what the address was, how to spell the address and then be able to find it in the CRM. And then as a backup to that, I can go in and listen to their calls as well and see how did they do. And so we have a weekly call. We’ll go back through those calls and listen together and say, okay, what’d you do right? What’d you do wrong? What can you improve on? So there’s so many different processes and systems that we use in order to do that quantity of houses.

You know, we could talk about that forever, but those are a few of the key ones that we rely on.

Christian (08:30.849)
No, absolutely. So your acquisitions process, I’m curious to know like how is your sales process? How do you actually orchestrate that? Right? What do they have to go through? How do you make your hiring decisions? Kind of walk us through that.

Brandon Rickman (08:44.386)
Yeah, so our acquisition process, I’ll kind of break it up into two, hiring and what our process is for acquisition. So our acquisition process is we either have the calls coming in through direct mail and then obviously cold calling and texting is we’re reaching out to them initially, but that’s done through a third party service. We don’t do that in house. So once they determine, let’s say through a cold call or a text that somebody is a potential seller, then it goes to our acquisition team.

And so our acquisition manager will then reach out to them and through a call process, so asking them questions, we want to find out number one, most importantly, in order for it to go from a lead to a qualified lead, we want to find out, you the owner of the house and are you interested in selling the house? And so if that’s true, then we take them to the next part of the process, which is we want to find out some details about the property, number one.

Number two, we want to find out their specific situation. And that’s really more important than the details of the property because number three, we’re going to go out and inspect the house and we’re going to find out exactly how many bedrooms and baths, what level of rehab it needs. So number two, part of that is the most important thing. And that is we want to find out their specific situation. Did they inherit the house? Are they a landlord and they’re tired of owning the property or?

A tenant moved out and didn’t, you know, left the house in disarray or destroyed the house and they don’t have the time or money to fix it. You know, what are the reasons that you’re looking to sell the house? And also how motivated are you to sell the house? Because we have various ways that we can help them. And we tell the sellers this, you know, we’re not, we’re not only coming to you and saying, here’s our offer, take it or leave it. We’re, we’re bringing to you five or six different options based on your specific situation of how we can help you.

get the money that you want for your house. And so if you want to close in seven days and you really need the money and you don’t want the house, then we can pay cash and close in seven days. And here’s the price for that. If you have time and you’re not in a financial crisis and you want to get top dollar and that’s your only reason for selling your house is to get the top dollar. Okay, well we can list the house for you and get you top dollar, but it’s gonna take more time and we’re gonna have to have more people come through the house and see it.

Brandon Rickman (11:03.694)
And then there several in between there that we can do. So we usually start at the low cash price offer, and then we work our way up. But all of that is really based on that conversation with them from our acquisition manager and finding out what is their specific situation. So that’s kind of our process. It’s an initial call and then a more in-depth call after we’ve done some research. then ultimately we go to the property and meet with the person face to face. So we do in-person appointments.

Christian (11:17.379)
I love that.

Brandon Rickman (11:32.15)
And I have found that it’s better, we have better or are able to build better rapport with a seller face to face, especially when you’re thinking of like cold calling and texting. If you just get a call out of the blue and somebody’s like, Hey Christian, you want to sell your house? You’re like, is this legit? Is this a scam? Who is this person? Do you really exist? So through multiple phone conversations and then going out in person where we can actually sit down face to face with a seller.

Christian (11:40.162)
I agree.

Brandon Rickman (12:00.13)
we have a much better conversion rate than, you lot of people do virtual wholesaling, virtual flipping, virtual offers. We prefer to do it in person.

Christian (12:10.743)
I think it makes it that much sweeter too, right? Because it just builds that trust factor with that seller as well. And plus, you know, if you, it shows them, if you make the conscious effort to go out there and physically meet them and take the time to understand and digest their situation, you know, that could be a really huge spread for your business, right? By you making that effort, but you not obviously focusing on the dollar figure, right? You’re focusing on, how can I solve this person’s problem? Right? And it seems like, you know, you’re doing a great job of that. So.

Brandon Rickman (12:15.533)
Yeah.

Brandon Rickman (12:36.888)
Right, absolutely.

Christian (12:40.289)
Well done, man. Well done. So let’s talk about, you know, a little bit about your private lending business. You know, I’m curious to know, you know, how’s that going for you?

Brandon Rickman (12:41.902)
Thank you.

Brandon Rickman (12:49.868)
It’s going well. we, you know, over the last couple of years, we would invest personally using our own capital into friends flips, like helping them out. You know, if we had some excess capital at the time, we would just help them out. you know, there’s several different ways that you can get money as a flipper. Obviously there’s institutional money, which is getting money through a bank. But what I found with that is they want, you know, W-2s and they want to see all of your history and they want to know, you know,

They want you to sign personal guarantees. it’s, although the interest rate is much lower, it’s much more difficult to get a loan. And then there’s hard money lenders out there who will loan at a higher interest rate. And that’s usually a bigger fund. have pretty fixed rate and terms and you can either take their rate in terms, which is again, is higher than a bank, but they don’t require W-2s and tax returns and all that kind of stuff. So a little bit easier to work with. And then there’s what we call private lenders, which is individuals. So people who know me,

They may have money in an IRA or a 401k and they know my business and they’re willing to loan me money so that I can then go do my business. They’ve seen me do it. They know that I’ve been successful in it and so they’ll loan me money. And so what I found over the years of flipping is that there was not a perfect solution as a flipper for getting that money that we needed. Even if you have several hundred thousand dollars in the bank when you’re flipping three, five, seven, 10 houses at a time.

You need lots of capital. And so what we ended up doing is rather than me investing my money into a single flip, myself and two business partners created a fund. And so we go out and raise money from other investors. We pay them a fixed rate return, and then we loan it out at a higher rate. And so we’re constantly trying to find other flippers who need access to capital.

because we are flippers, we understand the business, so we set up our rate and our terms and our draw request and all that to make it much easier for flippers. And so we go find those people who are looking for capital and we loan them money to do their flips. So it’s gone really well. We’ve raised a lot of money, got a lot of money deployed. And I think the key to it for us and maybe the differentiator for us is again, being that because we are flippers ourselves.

Brandon Rickman (15:11.82)
We know what was missing in the marketplace. We’re not coming at it from a banker’s mindset or from a traditional lender’s mindset. We’re coming at it from a flipper’s mindset. And what can we do to make this as easy as possible for other flippers and for ourselves? And that’s how we built the business.

Christian (15:27.937)
I love that. I love that. how can someone, let’s say someone’s trying to raise private capital as well, right? Someone’s never done this. They’re trying to get inside of the game. How does someone start from zero, right? How does someone build relationships with somebody? How does somebody earn that trust?

Brandon Rickman (15:43.694)
So I think if somebody just said, okay, I want to start flipping houses and I have $0 to my name, first of all, they can find our website, which is ProLend Capital, which I know you’ll put in the show notes, but ProLend Capital, there’s an application on there that they complete. takes about two minutes to complete the application. And then we start our underwriting process. so usually depending on the project, depending on the scope of the project, it does require somebody to put 10 to 20 % of the total cost down.

But we also have some ways around that. So I would say if somebody were starting out brand new and they had zero dollars, you want to work with a private lender if you can, somebody that knows you and is willing to loan you the money or come to ProLand Capital and we can help you not only with the 90 % but we can help you find resources for the other 10%. So that may be as an example, I would personally put in 10 % on your behalf to help you get to that full 100 % for a return. Or we have other investors who

are interested in smaller amounts, lesser amounts that they may be willing to put in, the 10 % or the 15 % to help you cover that shortage. But part of our program is after you’ve done three deals with us, then we’ll fund 100 % for you. So we’ll fund 100 % of the purchase and the rehab for you so you’re not having to come to the table with any money out of your pocket.

Christian (17:04.611)
Wow, so after three deals, huh? Okay, I like that. That definitely gives somebody to show, to prove it there. And then obviously you put in the sweat equity, right? To prove yourself, so awesome. So Brandon, let’s talk a little bit about your self storage facility. I mean, that’s a whole different beast, right? And there’s a lot of people that are out there saying, you can get into self storage with no money. Is that true? I’m really just curious to see your experience and how you started it and where you…

Brandon Rickman (17:09.902)
Yeah.

Brandon Rickman (17:15.63)
Right. Yeah.

Christian (17:33.921)
envision your self-stores facility business going.

Brandon Rickman (17:38.094)
Yeah, it’s been a work in progress, that’s for sure. I looked for value add self storage. So lot of the flippers that I’ve talked to, I consider wholesaling, flipping, and even new construction to be what I call transactional businesses. It’s a transaction, and when it’s done, you have to go find the next one. So let’s say flipping. You find a house, you remodel it, you sell it, you make some money. Okay, great, now you gotta go find another house to flip.

Same thing with new construction, same thing with wholesaling. So I wanted to try to get into a business that I could invest the time and money upfront, but it could pay me residual over the long haul, create generational wealth. And you can do that through single family rentals as well, which we do. We have single family rentals, both short-term and long-term rentals. But what I found over time is that with those, even if you’re cash-lowing 200, $300, $400 a month, and then you have a

AC unit that goes out it cost you $5,000 well all the money that you made from month to month for that whole year is now taken so the best thing with single-family rentals is once you have them paid off or Buy it with a long-term mindset buy it for cash flow today but consider it a 10 15 20 year hold period because Likely it’s gonna appreciate over that time and you’re making a little bit of cash flow every month

But for me, when I had those, I like, I’m gonna have to buy 100 of these things in order for it to really generate enough cash for it to really make sense and really move the needle for us. So I started looking at multifamily and self storage, and I was looking at value add stuff. So I wanna go find an existing facility that I can come in and put some capital behind, renovate, raise rents, whether it be multifamily or self storage, and then drive the value of those up by raising rents.

hold them for the long term so that I could create generational wealth. So that was the goal. And what I found is I like self storage better than multifamily because self storage you have generally one bathroom to take care of, no kitchen unless you have an office staff that they might have a break room, but you’re not having to continually keep up with toilets. And if you think multifamily or single family, every time somebody has a problem with a toilet or a water heater or a roof, you’ve got to go fix it.

Brandon Rickman (19:57.24)
So with self storage, you don’t have all that. And you don’t have people who are there all day, every day, right? Anybody who’s ever rented a self storage facility, they might go there once every few months to drop something off or pick something up. For the most part, sometimes people are there in and out a couple times a week, but for the most part, they pay for it, they go drop their stuff off and they leave. And so it’s very little maintenance, very little upkeep, but the return is really good. So on this particular deal,

I was looking for value add properties for a while and I just couldn’t find anything that penciled. And I had another wholesaler reach out to me, again, someone that I have a relationship with who knew that we are always looking for fix and flips. And they had two houses that were side by side on a combined four and a half acres. And they were just looking to wholesale the property to a flipper. So in my due diligence, I discovered that the future land use map for that particular area showed that they wanted it to go commercial.

And so I put the property under contract to lock it up and we had to close within 30 days. Right next door, there had been a new Walmart that had just been built. So I knew that the county, because of the Walmart and because of the future land use map showing that it was, they wanted it to go commercial, I knew there was a high likelihood that I could get it approved for a self storage facility. So I talked to a friend who was a broker in that area. He told me what the value of the land was. So I went ahead and closed on the property.

And the price that I bought it for, knew I could still flip both of the houses and make a profit on both of them if that was worst case scenario. My broker friend told me that if you tear those two houses down and just sell the land for commercial development, you will get a handsome return based on what you’re paying already. So mitigated a lot of that risk by knowing what I was doing. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do with the property, but I knew worst case scenario, I was still going to make.

So I went ahead and bought the property, took it through the process of getting a special use permit, which is what was required for the self storage facility. Once I had all that approved, I reached out to a friend who I knew had a lot of experience in self storage and brought him in as a partner to help me set up the deal and know how to do it. I’d never done one before. And so even though I’m a general contractor and everybody said, oh, it’s not that hard to build a self storage facility. I thought, well, I can either pay the dumb tax

Brandon Rickman (22:17.518)
and learn by making mistakes, or I can give up some equity and bring in somebody who has a lot of experience and knowledge and can help me structure it properly. So that’s what I did. I brought him in and you know, it’s a big project. It’s a large build, much, we’re having to raise a lot more money than I’ve raised in the past, but the return is huge too. So I think probably start to finish. I bought the property in May of 2022 and we’re just now starting construction.

So it’s taken several years to get to this point. So very long-term, but the return, you know, once we have it leased up and the idea for this one is to lease it up and then sell it, you know, the return is humongous. So a lot of details there. And I know I gave probably more than you were asking, but it’s a fun project, something new. I love to learn and kind of expand what I’m currently doing. And so it’s a new project and it’s a big project, but it’s a lot of fun. I’m enjoying it. And I would say.

Christian (22:47.896)
Wow.

Brandon Rickman (23:15.886)
If you can do it with no money, if you can do self storage with no money, I would like to learn how, because this one has cost us a lot of money. But again, huge return on the backend, so we’re excited about it.

Christian (23:21.699)
Christian (23:27.799)
I love that Brandon, super happy for you. And I’m really looking forward to seeing how your project goes. That’s incredible, man. I mean, it’s really one of those things too, where I you have to get out of your comfort zone to obviously keep increasing, right? mean, something that you said is you really didn’t have every step of the process figured out when you first started. And I think that’s where most people mess up is because they want all the pieces to the puzzle pieced together. And the way we look at it is, get started.

Brandon Rickman (23:46.328)
Absolutely.

Christian (23:56.939)
Right? Figure the rest out later. And then you also had relationships in your back pocket and you knew you could utilize that person and now look where it is now. Right? mean, if anybody’s listening to this, mean, that this is, that is the Holy grail, right? That is the process you should utilize and follow. so Brandon, mean, buy box criteria. I mean, how does, how do you, you know, figure out what a, your buy box criteria is and what you’re interested in buying.

Brandon Rickman (23:57.102)
Mm-hmm.

Christian (24:24.705)
when it comes to a storage facility, right? mean, there’s temperature control storage facilities, there’s non-temperature storage. How does someone figure out, like, what is a good buy or not?

Brandon Rickman (24:35.896)
Yeah, I think there’s several people who are big players in the business. There’s a lot of education out there for self storage, just like for flipping and other businesses too. And I have done those. have educated myself through paying other people who teach you how to do it. And obviously through partnering with my partner now, I’m learning a lot as well. But I think education is the most important part of starting any business. Obviously creating relationships with people who are already in the business and then educating yourself.

And with that education comes deal calculators. And so I think, you what I try to teach people is in real estate is don’t become emotional over the property. It’s just a number game. So plug the numbers into the deal calculator. If it makes sense, make the offer that you want to make. Don’t get emotionally tied to it. And this is true whether you’re flipping houses, wholesaling or self storage. Don’t get emotionally tied up in the offer price. Figure out what your price is going to be.

Stick to that price, just like I did in the example on the single family that we’re doing now where I told the agent I can only pay 300. When he kept coming back to me five and six times and trying to tell me why it was worth more, I don’t care. It’s just another property. I’m not emotionally tied to it. So you learn, like in any business, when you’re evaluating deals, and this would be an encouragement to others who are looking at self-storages, just take, you mentioned this, we call it take imperfect action. Just go do something. Take imperfect action.

and start evaluating deals. There’s lots of brokers out there who sell self-storage deals. Obviously those are on market and so they’re usually the brokers know what they’re worth. We can find off-market properties by doing direct mail and cold calling just like we do single-family homes. But by evaluating those properties and looking at them, know, what is the rent for that area? How many units are there? How much rent can we charge if we upgrade those units?

How much are we gonna have to spend to do the updating and the rehab? And then, you know, what is that cap rate, which is a much more detailed conversation, but at the end, it spits out a number and this is what you can pay for that property. And then, you know, again, the more you evaluate, the more properties you look at, the more you go through that process, the more you learn, you know, where you wanna be with those numbers and just make offers, you know, take imperfect action, make offers and learn as you go.

Brandon Rickman (27:02.43)
You you mentioned it and I use a silly analogy but if you were gonna you know leave from New York let’s say and drive to San Francisco and you said okay well I’m not gonna do that until I can figure out how to hit every green light never hit a stoplight never hit traffic you would never leave right you’d never leave New York you’d sit there for the rest of your life but if you go I’m not sure how long it’s gonna take me I can have a guess I know I’m gonna hit some red lights and I know I’m gonna hit some traffic but this is my best guess I’m gonna start

and we’ll figure it out along the way. We’re gonna make some mistakes and that’s okay. We’re gonna learn along the way. I think that’s the same with starting a business in real estate is take imperfect action. Just get in and start doing the work and evaluating deals and you learn more and more and more until you become an expert at it.

Christian (27:48.931)
Gosh, I love that Brandon. That is amazing and valuable information. mean, the best day to plant a tree is today, guys. You heard it here. First and first, ladies and gentlemen, that is amazing. Brandon, I wish we had honestly another hour to talk about everything that we’ve talked about. But unfortunately, we don’t. But Brandon, thank you so much for joining us today. If anyone wants to learn more about you, what you’re currently working on, how can they work with you? Where should they go?

Brandon Rickman (28:18.946)
Yeah, absolutely. So we do teach others. We have a coaching business as well. We teach others how to flip houses and do self storage facility. So that’s the flip genius. So the flipgenius.com and then all of our social media is my name. So at Brandon Rickman. So you can find us on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, all the different YouTube, all the different social media under the flip genius or Brandon Rickman. And you know, I’ve

I’d love to help out any way I can, whether it be single family, self storage, raising money, investing in your deals. So, you know, I’d love to help if I can and they can go on email me or schedule a phone call with me and I’ll talk to them and see if there’s a way we can help.

Christian (29:01.271)
I love it, I love it. Guys, you’re here first. Be sure to reach out to Brandon Rickman and he’ll be glad to talk to you guys. hope everyone enjoyed today’s episode. I know I did. Brandon, again, thank you so much for your time. I really value it more than you could ever imagine. And guys, we will see you on the next episode. You guys take care.