Secure Profitable Deals and Maximize your ROI

John Harcar (00:01.268)
Hey guys, welcome back to the show. John Hardcar here, your host. I’m here today with Jeremy Beland. And what we’re going to do is talk about securing profitable real estate deals and maximizing your ROI in your real estate business. Hey guys, remember at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, and really all real estate professionals, 2 to 5X their business. And it’s by providing resources and tools that can help you build the business you want to build and live the life you dreamed of. So Jeremy, welcome to our show, man.

JEREMY BELAND (00:29.794)
Hey John, thanks for having me today. It’s an honor to be on this podcast, so I appreciate it very much.

John Harcar (00:34.248)
Thank you, thank you. And that we talked before we go way back. I’m super excited to catch up. I’m super excited to talk about how we can really maximize that return because that’s huge in everybody’s business. But before we do that, let our audience who doesn’t know you kind of know a little bit about you. Where you from, how you got started, your family, et cetera.

JEREMY BELAND (00:54.414)
Okay, awesome, well appreciate that and I’ll try to summarize this up as quickly as possible. It’s gonna take me a few minutes here. I’m caffeineed up, so I’m power through. I’ll take a few breaths between sentences and just run on. But my name’s Jeremy Beland. I live up in New Hampshire. As I’m recording this, I am 48 years old. I actually started my real estate journey at 40. Before starting my real estate journey, I came into this world basically homeless. My mom was a young mom, had me out of…

John Harcar (01:01.396)
It’s okay man. Do it! Let’s go!

JEREMY BELAND (01:23.054)
wedlock and that didn’t go so well with her family so as a young mom with a young child she was kind of bouncing around from place to place and it really had a tough go of it at a young age and you know I feel for her and you know we were on welfare and just grew up very poor the early part of my life and then she was able to find somebody and she got married and we decided to have a growing family and then we basically you know up in New Hampshire found ourselves to have like

you lower middle class success. We had a nice small house and some cars and life was good. I had a bike, right? Things were great. We had cable TV, right? We had foods, so those things were great. And then, you know, as I was getting ready to hit into high school, right around 1990, yes, I’m that old people. Again, I said I was 48, right?

John Harcar (01:52.026)
Yeah, here you go.

John Harcar (02:04.5)
Same age.

JEREMY BELAND (02:05.71)
My stepfather at the time wanted to take a stab at entrepreneurship and decided to leave a really good tech job to do it. Shortly thereafter, unfortunately, he ended up losing everything. We lost everything. We ended up losing our house of foreclosure. They went through bankruptcy. We had our cars repossessed in the middle of the night kind of deal.

John Harcar (02:25.716)
Cheers.

JEREMY BELAND (02:27.136)
When you’re in that position with three kids, man, it’s really tough. you know, by the time I was in my second year of high school, and this happened right before I went into high school, I was already in three different high schools because we just were bouncing around from one crappy rental to one crappy rental. And they, you know, was a dark time in our lives, right? They were depressed and they were dealing with their own stuff, trying to navigate all that as young parents or young kids. Looking back as an adult now, you know, I realize how challenging that must have been. But anyway, I kind of went into, you know, your typical teenage

John Harcar (02:37.018)
Yeah.

John Harcar (02:53.192)
Sure.

JEREMY BELAND (02:57.04)
punk

error and I didn’t have really good guidance and I dropped out of high school and never went to college and then I found myself in my early 20s I was actually a window cleaner hanging off skyscrapers in Boston as a high-rise window cleaner making a whopping $24,000 a year you know 20 stories up covered in pigeon poop and smog and cold and driving an hour and a half to two hours into Boston from New Hampshire every day but I didn’t know what to do because I had no money had no credit I didn’t really know I just thought Jesus this is gonna be my life and then a good friend of

John Harcar (03:13.288)
Mmm.

JEREMY BELAND (03:28.268)
that I was playing semi-pro tackle football with said, hey dude, why don’t you come work with me at this company and was selling fax machines and printers and copies and things like that. And they were going to offer me a job making basically $24,000 a year working in an office, not hanging off a skyscraper. I said, I’m in. And I have no idea why they brought me. mean, I had no sales experience, no education, literally had to buy my first tie that I ever had in my life to get to this job interview. But I think they were like, you breathe, you’re hired. So they took me, I came in.

John Harcar (03:43.804)
Not hanging from a skyroo-

John Harcar (03:57.159)
Yeah.

JEREMY BELAND (03:58.08)
And then, you know, I started to really just learn how to do business to business, cold outreach, right? Door knocking, cold calling. This was my first adult experience of what it takes to be successful in sales. And that’s a lot of no’s before you get a yes. And then I had some success with it, believe it or not. I found myself into another sales job and I was making really good money. Found myself in my early 30s and I was making six figures. And at this point I got married, had two little kids.

John Harcar (04:15.837)
Yeah.

JEREMY BELAND (04:27.984)
and had my own house in New Hampshire. We had a pool, we had new cars, and for somebody who grew up very, very poor, mean, a lot of times, we didn’t have the basic necessities to survive. I was like the sitcoms we used to all watch TV in the 80s and 90s. I hit the epitome of the white picket fence dream, right? I achieved everything I wanted to, and it was like pinch me lifestyle. I I couldn’t believe that I achieved all that. Then the Great Recession happened.

John Harcar (04:39.945)
Right?

John Harcar (04:46.878)
You

John Harcar (04:54.152)
Let’s go.

JEREMY BELAND (04:56.142)
And if you’re a listener, listen, no, 2008, 2009, a lot of people got rocked in this world, and I was one of them. A year before the recession, we put an addition on our house, we had about $80,000 in equity. Two years later, our house was upside down, $150,000. Yeah, exactly. And on top of that, I lost my job, and I couldn’t find a job anywhere because it wasn’t just a housing crisis back then, it was an employment crisis. And because I had no education, people who are more educated, more successful,

John Harcar (05:09.94)
you

John Harcar (05:13.682)
Yeah.

JEREMY BELAND (05:26.096)
me were taking lesser paying jobs because they were in the same situations and it just pushed me down this totem pole and now I found myself at 33 years old on the brink of foreclosure and bankruptcy I said oh my god history repeats itself I’m gonna be a failure you know I spiraled into depression because I couldn’t provide for my family you know I just it was rock bottom time in my life and I didn’t know what to do I couldn’t you know there was no way to get out of my situation I was losing everything there was no way to no loan modifications no refinances there was no help at all then

The only people being helped were the big banks, right?

John Harcar (05:56.721)
Right. But, yeah.

JEREMY BELAND (06:00.27)
I had an option to go into the Air Force. That was the only thing I could think of. If I went into the Air Force, I could go away for six months to make $30,000 a year. Far cry from the 120, I was making two years earlier. But I would have to leave my family for six months, but they would provide me an education because I couldn’t afford to go back to college. So I said, well, if I can go to the military and learn this education, maybe could come back out and have a recession-proof job. But the problem was I needed a top secret class for this opportunity in the Air Force, and they weren’t going to let

John Harcar (06:08.372)
You

right?

JEREMY BELAND (06:30.274)
me to do that if I had foreclosure or bankruptcy on my record because the government feels like they will you will sell government secrets if you’re you know in foreclosure or bankruptcy but they would allow a short sale

John Harcar (06:34.356)
JEREMY BELAND (06:43.798)
So at this time before all this was happening, I was starting to learn about real estate investing. I read Rich Dad Poor Dad, The Cashflow Quadrant. I was actually starting to learn from people like Peter Conti, which is an old guru back in the day. And actually I even started doing some stuff where we were posting ads on local newspapers and things were different then. This was before the social media era.

John Harcar (06:51.036)
Yep.

Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (07:02.737)
Right, right.

JEREMY BELAND (07:04.046)
So I started to dabble it but I just couldn’t really get going because my world was collapsing around me. But I knew enough to reach out to a real estate investor. And a real estate investor came out and prevented me from foreclosure and bankruptcy and short-sailed my house. And he said to me, Jeremy, your mortgage company is terrible. They suck. But I’ve had a lot of success.

working with them, doing other short sales for other people. I felt very confident that I can get a short sale done for you. And then we can get you out of this situation. Your credit won’t be great for three years, but you’ll survive it. And then you can go into the Air Force and start rebuilding your life, right? So my first off-market deal ever, I was a motivated seller, not the buyer, but I was a motivated seller. And that guy gave me a reset button in life, right? And if it wasn’t for him,

John Harcar (07:27.507)
Hmm.

John Harcar (07:35.166)
Yeah.

John Harcar (07:41.684)
You were that motivated, for sure. Yeah.

JEREMY BELAND (07:52.096)
at that point I wouldn’t be here today talking to you John as a god honest truth that guy you know saved my life right because we’re all one of two life

John Harcar (07:54.705)
Okay, right on. Sounds like it.

JEREMY BELAND (08:01.966)
life decisions or life events from hitting rock bottom, right? It happens to a lot of us. Good people fall on high times. Sometimes we need help. A real estate agent couldn’t help me back then. They just couldn’t, but a real estate investor could. So I went into the military, came out of the military, got divorced. Now I found myself as a single divorced dad with two kids and I was approaching 40 years old and this is where I started to feel vulnerable again. I’m like, all right, I’m making six figures again, but I’m still living month to month. You know, I’m having some success, but what if the owner of my company sells? What if the economy

John Harcar (08:05.139)
John Harcar (08:13.235)
Right.

John Harcar (08:23.08)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

JEREMY BELAND (08:31.96)
does this what if this and this and this happens I was starting to feel like my god what am gonna do I don’t want to be in that situation for like the fourth time in my life and then I started listening to some podcasts and then I started to hear ding ding ding ding BAM and if you guys don’t know who that is that is Monk Kroll and yes yes and I heard his podcast and man his charismatic personality just

John Harcar (08:32.902)
Yeah.

John Harcar (08:40.18)
huh.

John Harcar (08:46.388)
Mr. Tom Kroll. Yeah.

JEREMY BELAND (08:57.346)
hooked me in like so many others and he was great and you know my thought process at that time John was like hey listen I don’t have money to buy rentals I don’t have money to flip houses I do want to do those things but I didn’t know you could use other people’s money at that time I just knew I didn’t have any so you know as I was listening to him traveling around the country as a salesperson for a year with analysis paralysis I said you know what I’m gonna do it I’m turning 40 years old for my 40th birthday I’m gonna join his coaching program

John Harcar (09:11.111)
Sure.

JEREMY BELAND (09:24.27)
didn’t have any money to join his coaching program. That was the only problem. But I did have a townhouse that I bought two years earlier. So I freaking sold my townhouse. I made $17,000 in equity. I moved me and my two kids into this crappy little apartment and I was all in. This is all the money I had. It either worked or it didn’t. And I took $11,000.

John Harcar (09:30.548)
Cool.

John Harcar (09:40.276)
Sacrifice.

JEREMY BELAND (09:42.382)
and I took $5,000 to join the wholesaling program and $6,000 with my initial marketing spend, right? We were doing direct mail to absentee owners with a handwritten white postcard and stuff like that. And you know, went on to do my first deal in 90 days, started January 2017, did 10 deals that first year of 73,000 bucks. But as I stand here today, John, we’ve done over 450 off-market transactions.

John Harcar (09:53.748)
huh.

JEREMY BELAND (10:08.566)
and we’ve done over 10 million dollars in gross assignments and gross profits since then and it all started with taking that leap of faith and that’s where I stand today.

John Harcar (10:11.74)
Let’s go.

John Harcar (10:17.436)
Let’s go, man. That’s such a great story. I mean, you talk about the rags to riches to rags to back to riches. mean, the perseverance. Yeah, I mean, that’s what we’ve all had. Right. And the perseverance, right, I think is is my biggest takeaway from that is that you had a plan, you had a goal and you no matter what. mean, we heard back to the day a lot of folks would.

JEREMY BELAND (10:24.238)
The roller coaster ride. Yeah.

John Harcar (10:40.4)
max out every credit card to get into a training or something. You sold a townhouse to get into one. So that’s awesome. I mean, that’s a great story. So what does your business look like now? It’s been what? Eight years, right? Since that. What does it look like now? What does your team look like?

JEREMY BELAND (10:45.57)
dead.

JEREMY BELAND (10:55.906)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Going on about nine now. Yeah, so, you know, we’ve had a lot of different identities over the years. You know, at first it was just me and then it was me and Shelly for a long time. And then we hired an acquisition guy and we built our New Hampshire market. That’s where I’m from is New Hampshire. So New Hampshire home buyers.

And then we had an opportunity to go to Western New York and we built out a really good business out in Buffalo and Rochester for a while and we did 150 wholesale deals out there in two and a half years. Went into Wichita, Kansas, had a guy there. We had some good success for a short amount of time. Went to Las Vegas, did one deal, epic failure. And then we even worked with Dan Toback, who’s actually a coach in our coaching program as well in Florida. And we’ve done a lot of deals with Florida down with him. So as it stands today, we still do a little bit of work

John Harcar (11:24.404)
Let’s go.

John Harcar (11:33.352)
Ha ha ha.

John Harcar (11:37.9)
cool.

JEREMY BELAND (11:44.062)
coastal Florida out of the East Coast so we have coastal Florida home buyers but our primary market is New Hampshire, Massachusetts and you know obviously we have the coaching program so you know I have one sales guy Eddie he’s been with us for six years he’s a rock star you know we have some VA’s and you know we’ve downsized a lot over the years you know what I’ve realized over time is scaling is great

John Harcar (11:51.326)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (11:59.262)
See?

JEREMY BELAND (12:08.024)
but it’s not very profitable. It’s great for the ego. It’s not great for the wallet. A lot of scaling is keeping up with the Joneses.

John Harcar (12:13.054)
Hmm.

Yeah.

JEREMY BELAND (12:17.004)
I didn’t really want to have a big business. At one point I thought I did and then the realities of it hit and I found over time less is more. So now as I stand today, I’m a lifestyle investor, right? So I work with a smaller team. We focus on acquiring off market properties. We maximize revenue on the disposition side. I try to buy and hold as many properties as I can. And now I’m just trying to teach as many people as I can all the things that I know that I did right and all the things that I did wrong and share that with others to hopefully build them a life of freedom through real estate investing like I have.

John Harcar (12:46.832)
Love it. Do you operate mostly virtual model? mean, probably in your own. so you do in every market. You got someone that’s going in there and seeing all the houses and doing and meet and talk.

JEREMY BELAND (12:50.423)
No.

JEREMY BELAND (12:55.97)
We had boots on the ground in all those markets. We hired our own acquisition people. We trained them all in-house. You know, the virtual model’s great. You know, some people have success with it. I’m not a big fan of it myself personally. The last thing I wanna do is be stuck at a phone, making phone calls eight hours a day. That just sounds like a cold calling cubicle desk job for me. You know, and I find that if you go, you can become better in your own market doing less deals, right? So if you’re virtual, you have to do a lot of volume, the spreads per deal.

John Harcar (13:01.492)
Sweet.

John Harcar (13:06.654)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (13:23.303)
Sure.

JEREMY BELAND (13:26.004)
aren’t great, you become a motivated seller a lot of times because you don’t have a lot of buyers and you’re scrambling to find a buyer so you’re selling your deals at a discount and then getting them all to closing it’s just a nightmare right so you know we’re easily do seven figures a year here in New Hampshire Massachusetts basically offer three deals a month on average right it doesn’t take a lot of work to do three deals whereas if you’re virtual doing a million dollars a year you know you’re probably talking about ten deals a month and you know

John Harcar (13:32.478)
Yeah. Yeah.

John Harcar (13:52.507)
At least.

JEREMY BELAND (13:53.654)
Yeah, and it’s a lot of work per deal. That doesn’t change. So I’d do less is more.

John Harcar (13:58.377)
Well, I also think too, I’m under the thought of being in person, being that chest to chest, like you said, you’re going to get better deals. You’re going to be able to build better rapport. You’re going to be able to get a better value or give a better value to your seller versus being on the phone. And that’s just so impersonal. And that’ll kind of take us to the next topic I want to talk about that we chatted before about kind of the acquisition stuff, right? We grew up and we came up in the business in the TTP area type, you know, TTP type of time, Mike, really started focusing

focusing on more talking to people, And looking at that. So you mentioned being good at conversations, having that skill set. Tell me how important that is.

JEREMY BELAND (14:37.358)
I think it’s the key to all my success really. I honestly think it’s that important, right? So Wholesale Inc. was great when it initially started. It taught us how to do our first wholesale deal.

We’re a field. really didn’t tell us how to get better at it. And it didn’t really tell us how to get better at marketing, run the business or talking to people. And it wasn’t until I came across Todd Toback, you know, which is that in a circle who he really specialized on teaching people how to talk to sellers, overcoming objections, coming from a place of empathy, providing value. And like you, I believe in belly to belly. I think that’s the way to go. You’re able to get better deals. You have a lot less cancellations this way. And you could provide just better value to

John Harcar (14:50.355)
Right.

John Harcar (15:03.826)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (15:14.397)
Yes.

JEREMY BELAND (15:17.008)
people in general and I was one of those motivated sellers back in the day that guy helped me right I don’t know if I would have done a deal over somebody over the phone right so

John Harcar (15:25.576)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

JEREMY BELAND (15:27.274)
So it’s been critical. once we started to learn about how to get better at talking to sellers and because you’re good at talking to people, good at sales, doesn’t mean you’re necessarily good at talking to distressed sellers who are emotional, irrational, habitual, procrastinators. They kick the can down the road as far as they can. They’re like an ostrich which is the head in the sand saying, la, there’s no problems around me. It’s a challenge and Todd Toback was great.

John Harcar (15:41.844)
Yeah.

JEREMY BELAND (15:52.564)
And we went from deals our first year to 24 our second 36 the year after and then we’ve been seven figures ever since. And not only did I spend a lot of time and effort learning from him, I spent a lot of time and money on my acquisition guys training them from Todd Toebak. Then eventually Cody Hoffine had some training that he talked about sales training before he opened up his Joe home buyer franchise. And then we brought Dan Toebak in and before we started doing business with Toebak in coastal Florida or him as a coach in our coaching program.

John Harcar (16:07.24)
Mm-hmm.

JEREMY BELAND (16:22.588)
I was paying him $3,000 a month to coach my guys because they did a hundred deals each but I wanted them to get better. Dan had 600 deals to his belt and he was just a master acquisition specialist and he’s a great coach. And that’s how we built REI Freedom. We just realized there is more of a need to train people how to get better talking to people because we all know how to pull lists. We all know how to generate leads but you’re spending all this time, money and energy creating leads. You really need to be converting those not only to contracts but contracts that close, right?

John Harcar (16:29.021)
Right?

John Harcar (16:33.683)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (16:51.635)
Yes.

JEREMY BELAND (16:52.378)
people don’t even know what their conversion percentage is. Like how many leads does it take for you to close a deal per marketing channel? A of people are like, I don’t know. Well, what’s your ROI on these marketing channels? I don’t know. Well, I mean, then you’re just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping it sticks, right? If you want to make money, you have to treat it like a professional business and honing in your acquisition skills is a critical part of that success.

John Harcar (16:59.956)
I don’t know

John Harcar (17:05.812)
Yeah.

John Harcar (17:13.87)
Is do you think that is the most important thing that people that are getting in the business need to really work on first as opposed to all the other little things like Legion like that? I mean, do you really think it’s about developing that skill?

JEREMY BELAND (17:28.246)
Yeah, you know, in this day and age where it is more competitive and more popular than ever, right? So you got to…

Back in the day, we had local wholesales. Now we have local and virtual wholesales. Everybody’s pulling the same prop stream leads and calling everybody the same thing. So what’s going to set you apart? You’re just going to spend more than everybody else. That doesn’t really create a great opportunity business model for success. You know, the way to really separate yourself from the competition is how much better can you be at locking up deals that are great value and providing value to the sellers and having a better conversion and less cancellations? And I feel like you’re honing those skills. listen, it takes

John Harcar (17:42.568)
Great.

John Harcar (18:02.246)
Uh-huh.

JEREMY BELAND (18:05.994)
a lot of repetition, takes years to master. It doesn’t happen overnight. I don’t care how good you are, it takes years to master. And that’s where all the money’s made, right? You know, the reason why we’re able to do, you know, three to four deals a month and have big spreads. Well, know, the exit strategy, which we’ll talk about shortly, is a big part of it, but…

John Harcar (18:10.804)
It does.

JEREMY BELAND (18:24.77)
you know, none of that happens until we master the art of acquisitions. You could generate leads, but you need to make sure that you have consistent deals coming into your business each and every month. And the only way to do that is be really good talking to people.

John Harcar (18:29.169)
Yeah.

John Harcar (18:39.058)
Yeah, and I think too that a lot of times when you develop that skill of talking to people, it eliminates a lot of the price factor and some of the homeowners that you’re working with because they’re more apt sometimes to take your less offer because they have that rapport and trust with you. That’s a big thing.

JEREMY BELAND (18:54.318)
couldn’t agree with you more, John. We’ve done so many deals over the years where we’ve gotten for less money than our competitors because they felt more certain that we’d be able to provide the value and fall through on what we promised.

John Harcar (19:06.546)
Yeah, and I think the brand, your branding helps a lot about that too for your credibility and going into people as well.

JEREMY BELAND (19:14.24)
And I couldn’t agree with you anymore, but you can tell you know your stuff, John. love this. you know, I, I do a lot of speaking engagements at a lot of, REAs and meetups around the country. And I was at one last night and one of the top five sales techniques in our business is providing certainty. Right. So the reason why that,

John Harcar (19:18.548)
You

JEREMY BELAND (19:32.11)
invested back in 2009 was able to resonate with me because he was be able to provide certainty. Jeremy, this mortgage company sucks to work with, but I have had success getting other short sales done. I feel very confident we can get done this done for you, right? That is providing certainty. So, you know, we’re all about providing certainty from our experience. But one of the things that we really strive to do is build a really good testimonial and review, you know, presence, right? So if you go to New Hampshire,

John Harcar (19:50.494)
Yeah.

JEREMY BELAND (20:02.094)
your home buyers, we have over 100 five-star Google reviews. Our nearest competitor in all of New England has less than half of that, right? And let’s face it, we live in a world where everybody goes online to check who’s coming to their house on Saturday to sell them, right? And if they go and they see, wow, they have 100-something reviews, and they see all these comments, like, wow, these people are legit, they know how to get the deals done, they’re not just, you know, this preconceived notion of a slimy investor that they may have

John Harcar (20:06.654)
huge.

John Harcar (20:10.74)
huge.

John Harcar (20:15.912)
yeah, of course.

JEREMY BELAND (20:32.034)
head, it’s real people providing real value, once I get in the door they already feel like I can do the right thing for them.

And I haven’t even said a word yet, just because I’m providing certainty from that online presence which you mentioned. I couldn’t agree more. Super, super important. anybody listening, if you’re not getting a testimonial or a Google review at the closings, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Every closing you do, make sure you’re there when they’re super happy and they’re getting their check to either give you a testimonial, a video testimonial, written testimonial, or some kind of Google review. Those will be huge for your long-term success in this business.

John Harcar (20:39.39)
Yeah. Yeah.

John Harcar (21:07.88)
I’ll go a step further to say that I have even gotten testimonials or things from folks that we couldn’t work a deal with. Because if you look at a site that’s got all good reviews, it’s a bunch of BS. If you look at the ones with bad reviews, and not bad reviews, but honest reviews, like, hey, we couldn’t work together because of this, but they were on time, blah, blah, it still adds and lends to what we’re trying to build, and that’s authority. We want to be the authority when we’re walking in that door.

JEREMY BELAND (21:16.162)
Me too, me too, yep.

JEREMY BELAND (21:37.742)
couldn’t agree more, John. And you know, the bad reviews we have are because we used to send letters out with our business name on them. We don’t do that anymore because somebody would be like, they sent me a mail and how dare they? One star review. But, you know, we do have a lot of people we’ve actually never done business with in there that says they didn’t buy our house, but they were super honest and super kind. And they led me in the right direction, which was a better result for me. And I’m very thankful for that. And they leave me a review for that. We have a whole bunch of those, actually.

John Harcar (21:45.413)
I’m great.

John Harcar (21:50.586)
Hahaha

John Harcar (22:06.728)
That’s perfect. Let’s talk about our second part of what we, know, the theme of this, that’s maximizing your ROI, right? You know, we know, yes, we know that, you know, you get into wholesaling and wholesaling is great, but there’s a lot of times when there’s money left on the table. So tell me, how do we maximize ROI? How do you teach it?

JEREMY BELAND (22:12.47)
Woohoo! Money making!

JEREMY BELAND (22:24.525)
Yeah, you know.

I love it. This is something I’m very passionate about with the acquisitions, right? So let’s, you know, we started with the acquisitions, we mastered acquisitions, we spent all this time, money and energy generating leads, locking up deals, getting these people to the closing line, right? And now some people just say, well, I have two or three cash buyers and I’m just going to sell it to them. Well, I want $20,000, Mr. Cash buyer from this deal. Cash buyers like, well, I have to haggle you because if I’m not, I’m doing myself a disservice, right? So I’m going to, you know, I’ll give you 10,000.

John Harcar (22:52.582)
No,

JEREMY BELAND (22:55.6)
the numbers don’t work for me and then you go back and forth you sell at 15,000 right this happens all the time now you’re selling your hard work and deal at a discount to your cash buyer as as Todd Toback would say that would make you a cash buyer employee right

John Harcar (23:10.26)
for you.

JEREMY BELAND (23:11.246)
Yeah, you’re finding them deals and you’re now a motivated seller selling your deals at a discount. And I just feel like that does such a disservice because it’s such hard work. It costs a lot of money these days to get deals, a lot of time and energy. You should be maximizing the revenue on the back end as much as you can. So here’s a few things that I would suggest. One, make sure you have a massive, massive cash buyers list. Don’t do a few. I want you to think few thousand, right? And then what you want to do is create a bidding war. So we average over

John Harcar (23:27.666)
huh.

John Harcar (23:37.715)
No.

JEREMY BELAND (23:42.032)
$35,000 for our wholesale deals over the last five years. Okay, we market our properties at $4,900 over contract price and we’ll have a one-time showing it’s basically an open house, but because we’re not a brokerage we can’t say open house We just say inspection walkthrough. We have one every you know, Tuesday Wednesday a Thursday You have this is your one-time showing blasted out to all of our cash buyers and we get them to the house We keep the price low. We want to drive as much traffic into this house as we can I don’t want three people there. I want 30 people in there and we talk

John Harcar (23:44.424)
Wow, let’s go.

John Harcar (24:08.914)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

JEREMY BELAND (24:11.056)
It’s gonna be a freaking circus. It’s gonna be crazy. And what we do is we get there and it’s like an auction. Hey guys, start at X and they start going back and forth and back and forth and we bid them up as high as possible. So rather than them me, them squeezing me for five grand, I’m squeezing them for five grand. Right.

John Harcar (24:27.56)
You’re squeezing them. So you’re so you contract the property at 150, right? You put it out there at 150 for nine and just get everybody as many people as you can. And then.

JEREMY BELAND (24:36.066)
Correct.

JEREMY BELAND (24:41.102)
Yeah, because the lower the price, right, the more attractive it will be. And I know a majority of those people who see that number aren’t going to go there, right? Or they’re going to go there, but they’re not going to buy the house. But if I market it, let’s say at 170, all those people who were on the fence aren’t going to show up because they’re going to be like, ah, those numbers are too tight. It’s not a smoking home run deal, so I’m not going to go, right? And then rather than having 30 people at the inspection walk through, I have 10 or five, right? I’ve cut out a whole bunch of people. So.

John Harcar (25:01.576)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (25:07.665)
Yeah.

JEREMY BELAND (25:08.366)
I don’t really care if they’re going to buy. I just want them there because the people who are buying, which is really 80-20 rule applies to your buyers list. 20 % of your buyers are going to buy 80 % of your deals. So we want to make sure that the 20 % that actually are going to perform are feeling this nervousness about all these other people there trying to steal their deals away from them and get them to dig into the pockets a little deeper.

John Harcar (25:18.162)
Yep.

John Harcar (25:25.939)
I love it.

John Harcar (25:30.0)
I love it. lot of people are doing nowadays like the buying now price, right? Do you guys ever do like a, we’re going to put it here? No, you just want, you like the bidding. You want that bidding we’re going.

JEREMY BELAND (25:37.23)
No.

I want to get top dollar and that’s why we’re averaging $35,000 a deal. But, you know, and we also, love pre-marketing our deals on the MLS. So here at New Hampshire, Massachusetts and in Florida, we’ll pre-market the deal on the MLS as a double close. That gets more eyes on us. We still only listed $4,900 over contract price. We tell the seller, this is what we’re going to do. If they give us their sign in the contract and give us their written and verbal consent, we’ll do this. And we drive even more traffic there. And this has been a game changer.

John Harcar (25:42.42)
you.

John Harcar (25:57.696)
huh.

John Harcar (26:07.558)
Do you have to have them sign it, sign something like a list, anything for the listing or, but you do. Okay. Yeah. So it’s kind of like innovation, right? When you do that part.

JEREMY BELAND (26:10.167)
We don’t have to but we do we do yeah, we like to just

Well, it’s not an ovation because at that point we’re still assigning it on the back end, but we’re getting all the eyes of the MLS to my houses, right? So it’s just driving more traffic there and people on the MLS like to spend more money than our cash buyers who buy off market. That’s another little trick. But John, also it just doesn’t stop there, right? So that is a way to maximize as a wholesaler, but wholesaling is only going to take you so far in this business. If you think you’re going to build a wholesaling business and retire and be rich and all this other stuff, I promise you it’s not going to happen.

John Harcar (26:21.77)
Okay, got it.

John Harcar (26:26.002)
Love it.

JEREMY BELAND (26:46.902)
to have other exit strategies. So I do like flipping. I love whole tailing. We all want to buy and hold properties, right? And we do novations, we do creative financing. These are all different tools in the tool belts that we have. When you first get started, master the art of becoming a wholesaler, master the art of acquisitions, master the art of selling your contract to cash buyers for as much money as possible. Once you get that system down where you have deals coming in on the regular, now you can start looking at those other exit strategies, especially if you can learn how to bring in private lending. Whole

John Harcar (27:02.818)
huh.

JEREMY BELAND (27:16.752)
Flipping and all these other things and this allows me to maximize my revenue on all deals because I’m cherry picking my pipeline Hey, this makes a good quick flip We could probably make 90k on this and have it on the market in 90 days rather than selling it for 30k, right? this is a big old farm houses with $250,000 of renovation. I don’t want to take on this project. Let’s wholesale it this makes a great buying hole. Let’s keep this as a burr and not let’s not just wholesale it right so we’re

John Harcar (27:30.376)
Yeah.

JEREMY BELAND (27:44.684)
building long-term wealth while we’re acquiring BRRR properties, we’re keeping cash flow going regularly with wholesaling the deals we don’t want, and we’re getting big chunks of change handful of times a year with our flips and our whole deals by using other people’s money to take these properties down, clean them out, immediately re-list them, or just doing some light contracting. I don’t do any big projects anymore. I’ve done a few. They’re not worth it. I wholesale those off. I just do the light rehabs and the quicken buff, fix the flips, the lipsticks.

John Harcar (28:08.038)
Yeah.

John Harcar (28:11.796)
The lipsticks, yeah. The lipsticks.

JEREMY BELAND (28:14.608)
And I’ll make an average of 30 to 40 % more profit by doing those jobs myself. just said, assigning them in 30 days, I have to wait the 90 to 120 days for that. So you have to kind of do some juggling there, but this is how you average. Like last year, we averaged $45,000 per deal on all of our deals across the board, right? And now I only have to do two or three deals a month at $45,000 to be a million dollar a year business.

John Harcar (28:35.06)
That’s awesome.

JEREMY BELAND (28:44.096)
Right? That’s all I need to do. And it doesn’t take a lot of bandwidth, a lot of infrastructure to do two or three deals a month.

John Harcar (28:45.192)
Yep. Yep.

John Harcar (28:50.694)
Mm-mm, not at all. We’re running out of time here, but real quick, I wanna make sure we talk about REI Freedom. So tell me about REI Freedom and kinda give you a little 30 second plug. Yeah.

JEREMY BELAND (29:01.42)
Yeah, thanks, John. So if anything, what you just listened to, what I just said.

is attractive to you, come join the REI Freedom Coaching Program. We’ll teach you to emulate exactly what we’re doing from building a marketing system to the acquisition sales side with Dan Toebak, which is one of the best sales coaches in this country. I don’t know how we’re so lucky to have him. We’re blessed. He’s amazing. He’ll teach you how to talk really good with sellers. I’ll teach you how to run your business, manage your marketing, and sell your properties for as much money as possible. We believe in lifestyle investing. Less is more if you want more time.

John Harcar (29:21.981)
He is.

JEREMY BELAND (29:34.98)
not necessarily more deals. We’re the person for you. We’ll teach you how to make really good money, work in pod time, and build a life of freedom, however that looks for you through real estate investing just like we have.

John Harcar (29:46.677)
I love it. Jeremy, this has been tremendous. So folks can get a hold of you. know I have a lot of your contact info and I’ll put it in the show notes, but just tell everybody how they can reach out to you if they want to talk about REI Freedom or just pick your brain on anything.

JEREMY BELAND (30:01.836)
Yeah, you know, I’m all over social media, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Jeremy, J E I E Y B land B E L A N D Jeremy B land just I’m everywhere. I talk to people all day every day. I’m happy to give you free advice and guidance for nothing. I’m happy to. I believe in providing value and the more value you give, the more value will come in return. I just just how I am. believe in the universe and common all that. Outside of that, John, I’d to give a free giveaway to your audience. Is that OK? All right.

John Harcar (30:29.078)
sweet, yes go ahead.

JEREMY BELAND (30:30.752)
If you guys go to REIFREEDOM.COM forward slash top sales, that’s REIFREEDOM.COM forward slash top sales, we’ll give you our free…

top sales techniques that we talk about the acquisitions getting good talking to sellers and everything we’ll give you our top sales techniques PDF ebook for free you just download it start reading it study it practice it implement it I guarantee you get a handful of more deals in the course of 12 months that’ll make you a lot more money so free go get it

John Harcar (31:02.152)
That’s huge guys. If you don’t take advantage of that, once again, REIFREEDOM.COM forward slash top sales, you know, reach out to Jeremy, man. If you guys didn’t pick up at least one nugget today that can grow your business, re listen to this thing, man, because there’s so many that he dropped Jeremy once again. I’m so grateful to have you on our podcast. You are a great dude. They, when I mentioned your same old great dude now, and it’s been a pleasure to have you on here.

JEREMY BELAND (31:27.0)
Pleasure’s all mine, John. Thank you so very much.

John Harcar (31:29.236)
And everybody I hope you guys enjoyed this show and we look forward to seeing on the next episode. Cheers!