Transform Your Mindset: The BBLR System for Motivated Sellers

John Harcar (00:01.887)
All right. Hey guys, welcome back to our show. I’m your host, John Harcar, and I’m here today with Blake Cory. And what we’re going to talk about with Blake is, besides his journey in business and in real estate, we’re going to talk about how he helps other agents or other realtors kind of shift your mindset to really achieve true, true freedom. Remember guys, at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, I mean, all real estate entrepreneurs, two to five extra business.

And we do that by providing the tools and resources to grow the business you want to have, which helps in turn live that life you’ve dreamed of. Blake, man, welcome to our show.

Blake Cory (00:40.334)
Yeah, thanks, John. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here today,

John Harcar (00:43.531)
Yeah, and I love mindset, right? And I love when people talk about how to help shift mindset for the benefit. And before we get into all that kind of stuff, why don’t you tell our audience a little bit kind of about you, your background in business and real estate and what got you to today?

Blake Cory (01:00.27)
Cool. Yeah, I have a pretty interesting journey. So I’ve been now, I’m 38 this year. Next year will be my 20 year anniversary as a licensed real estate agent. I started at 19. As a matter of fact, people always ask me, know, why did you get in so young or how did you get in so young? Well, when you’re a high school dropout and you get a GED, I mean, the next best thing is going to real estate, right? Come on. So no, I mean…

John Harcar (01:23.541)
Yeah.

Blake Cory (01:26.158)
Dropped out of high school at 17, got my GED, tried to figure out my life, became a Starbucks barista, worked there, and then a mortgage lender back in 2005 came in and said, hey, you you get some high energy, you can communicate well with people, you just think about getting into real estate. Of course, that’s exactly what I did, right? Went, took the test, got a license, a lot easier to get a license back then than it is now. But got license and the rest is history. I walked right into real estate right as the Great Recession was starting, so.

John Harcar (01:48.215)
Yeah,

Blake Cory (01:55.498)
It was a pretty interesting time, 2006, seven and eight, just skinning my teeth on a consistent failure, consistent rejection because I was being taught the old way of doing things and it just wasn’t working. And that’s why I appreciate your podcast so much is just because there’s so much education put out there for people to increase their business. And I think a lot of real estate agents forget this and people with inside the real estate investment community.

John Harcar (02:04.14)
Mm-hmm.

Blake Cory (02:23.086)
Think about where we were 15, 20 years ago and how limited information and knowledge was, right? You had to go to seminars and you had to buy some books and some VHS tapes. And now you go on podcasts, go on to YouTube. You can find out so much great information that completely changes your life. So, but yeah, anyway, got my real estate license. 2009 ended up leaving sales and started working as a bird dog for a real estate investor and helping them find short sale deals everywhere. And

John Harcar (02:37.511)
fight everything.

Blake Cory (02:53.122)
man, I will tell you, that was fun for about a year, and then all of a sudden, they rejected one. said, no, this is a deal. We gotta figure this out. And so I took a swing at it. I’m like, here goes nothing, but of course, I didn’t have any money to do anything. I put under contract and negotiated a great price, and I went and found transactional funding. That’s what it called at that time, John A, B, B, C transactions. And I remember the day everything changed.

John Harcar (03:14.933)
Right?

Blake Cory (03:19.702)
it was doing that transaction that I normally would have been paid like four grand on for helping facilitate. And I got a check for $73,000 doing an ABBC transaction back then. was like, not exactly. I ended up finding an end buyer using FHA financing. I just used a creative method for doing it back then. And from there, I was able to actually turn it over to an end buyer and being a real estate agent.

John Harcar (03:31.607)
So you wholesaled it.

John Harcar (03:39.287)
Okay.

Blake Cory (03:47.904)
I knew the rules of the MLS and how to be able to get it up there while still being compliant. So I was able to find an end buyer FHA financing and I was able to circumvent the 90 day seasoning rule. It took knowing the right people and having good attorneys who draft up the right paperwork but we were able to do it and it was a done deal. I always think of wholesale being able to turn over to a cash buyer but it wasn’t the case here. So for the next four years I did that few hundred properties throughout three states until

John Harcar (04:06.547)
Mm-hmm. That’s awesome.

Blake Cory (04:16.93)
Block Rock came in and started crushing me, right? Hedge funds came in and just started buying everything up. And there was nothing. Like I couldn’t get a deal. And if I did, I was pressing it. I was trying to be skinny on all the margins. And guess what? I just started losing money left and right. And so that’s when I was 20, I think 27 or 28 years old and my first experience of going broke, like literally going broke. And so I had to figure out how to make some quick money. So I had a license. Might as well go back into selling, right?

John Harcar (04:21.217)
buying everything.

John Harcar (04:29.985)
Yeah.

Blake Cory (04:46.574)
So in 2014, went back and sold six homes and over the course of the next 10 years, completely changed. I went from selling six homes to selling 500 homes a year. last five years, I’ve sold 2000 homes. And from 2015 to 20, I was a real estate coach helping real estate agents. I worked for a coaching firm at that time because our business was growing so rapidly. Our business was growing 50 to 100 % every year. so now here I am.

John Harcar (04:59.927)
Wow, it’s incredible.

Blake Cory (05:15.918)
2025, we’re gonna sell a little over 500 homes, over 10 million in commission. I mean, my life is completely transformed because I learned the secrets to success within the real estate space. But that’s great, but I realized something. I told you this, know, when we were right before we started the show, I said, know, in 2021, I experienced a huge transformation. I went from

John Harcar (05:28.193)
Right.

Blake Cory (05:45.038)
2019 selling 151 homes, to sell in 300 homes in 2020, to sell in 554 homes in 2021. It was a giant change for me.

John Harcar (05:55.575)
But why do you think that was? What happened? What mindset shifted? What led you to be able to do that?

Blake Cory (06:03.756)
Leverage, leverage, right? Leverage in people and leverage in listings. I started getting laser focused on more listings and investing my money into sellers, specifically motivated sellers, and I identified the avatar that I wanted into my business. And then I started going out and recruiting agents, agents who were good salespeople but just couldn’t pull the whole thing together.

John Harcar (06:05.847)
What do mean?

John Harcar (06:31.351)
Mm-hmm.

Blake Cory (06:33.548)
And that’s what changed everything. That’s what changed everything. Especially on the lead generation side. Making sure the avatar was the motivated seller. And honestly, I take most of that credit from, or I give most of that credit to the investor world. Because investors are fantastic at lead generation, finding what I call pain-driven motivated sellers. People with pain, right? Not just life, people have pain. They have pain and they need a fast cash solution.

John Harcar (06:57.131)
Yep. Yep.

Blake Cory (07:02.798)
And I brought that into real estate from a sales perspective. And I was sending my sales guys out there where they could actually go, listen, you know, if you go get a cash offer from an investor, you’re gonna get here. I can get you here and I can do it quick. I can do it easy. And let’s go ahead this route. And all of a sudden listings were coming in like hotcakes. And so that was the biggest thing leverage, leverage from listings and leverage from actual agents on our, on our team. So that was the big change there. But for me,

John Harcar (07:21.303)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (07:28.779)
Got it. Got it. Okay.

Blake Cory (07:33.55)
I sat down 2022 and I remember, I remember the day, know, the beginning of the year, I always try to sit down and do some goal planning, some vision planning for the team. And I remember looking and feeling like, man, we just had the best year ever. We just made a ton of money. But at the end of the year, I needed to go find tax breaks. I needed to go find tax shelters because we were going to have just almost a $300,000 IRS bill. That’s not even including state of California, right? That’s just the IRS.

So I was at the end of the year, I was everywhere trying to multifamily projects and you know, let’s buy moving trucks and doing this and doing that. So here I am 2022, like we had the best year ever. We sold more houses than outside of nine other people in the state. We were number 10 that year in the state of California for unit sales. And yet here I am with a business that’s not really worth anything, with no hard assets and with

very little cash in the bank, even though we had the best year ever, because I had to put it in different places to be able to avoid taxes. I said, what am I doing?

John Harcar (08:41.207)
Mm.

Blake Cory (08:43.342)
And I was like, what exactly am I doing? I’ll never forget, was like three days later, we’re still on the New Year’s break and I’m a huge Kiyosaki guy. I’m like over the and the stars. I was in the Rich Dad, Rich Dad, Real Estate.

John Harcar (08:53.236)
Awesome.

John Harcar (08:56.759)
I gonna say, I like to ask people if they had any influence or read any books. Did you have that Rich Dad Porn Out experience also?

Blake Cory (09:05.644)
You know, yes, to answer the question, yes, but I had a lot later. I had already been in real estate for a while. It was actually my wife and I’ll never forget my, I’m about to take my now wife. So we’re about to go to Cabo on vacation. And it was our one year anniversary from dating and I was gonna ask her to marry me and I’ll never forget my buddy. He goes, hey, you love reading, read this down there and then have your wife read it too.

So I took it, you he was joking around because he knew I was gonna ask her to marry me. So I take the book and I kind of convince her to read it with me. And we both fell in love with that fable. Like we just fell in love with the storyline and we got engaged. And when we came back, I immediately, because I know the power of education, right? know, success leaves clues. Stand on the shoulders of giants like Tony Robbins would say, right? Like, like find out what that is. So we called up and I’m like, hey, I want to sign up for coaching. It’s, you know, they’re like, it’s 10 grand. Okay, cool. Here’s the credit card. I want to sign up to know.

how to build this type of income. And it was, so that’s how we got into that world. But even though, know, here we were four years later, it was, I still hadn’t done much with it. You know, I actually flew from Southern California to Indianapolis. I found that marketplace. I could put California dollars into that market, buy rentals, you know, buy $40,000 duplexes, put it $60,000, $70,000 into it, do all that great stuff. But.

After a few years of doing that, I realized it’s just not scalable for me. It just wasn’t. The flight going back and forth, there’s no direct, there’s a layover, and then you don’t have the same eye on your properties as you do here. You don’t have the same contractor connections. And I got up to 17 units back there, but I was on the phone what seemed to be all the time dealing with issues, even though I had a property manager in place. And I was just like, I’m done. I can’t go ring somebody’s neck from across the.

John Harcar (10:56.872)
Right

Blake Cory (10:58.182)
I mean, I just, and so, because I thought it wasn’t possible to buy cash flowing assets in Southern California. I mean, I just did not think it was possible to get something. Even though I’ve come to later find out not only is it possible, I mean, you can get them anytime you want. You just gotta know how to structure things and find it. But anyway, so liquidated the whole thing, came back beginning of 2022. I realized it’s starting over at zero.

And in, I wanna say it’s Kiyosaki’s book, Conspiracy of the Rich. Maybe it’s one of the other ones. Most people don’t even know how many Rich Dad books there are. I own every single one. I own Cashflow 101 and I own Cashflow 202. I had to find that thing on eBay on how to play that game, which is a whole netherworld. I remember, I just fell in love with his books. I fall in love with his stories. But it was a statement in there and then I…

John Harcar (11:39.159)
There’s a bunch.

Blake Cory (11:56.598)
I back, I highlighted it, put it on the walls, and I remember, I look at it every day. A business is designed to produce cash flow so you can go out and acquire true assets. And I was like, that’s it. My real estate business is a cash flow play so I can go out and acquire true assets. And that’s when everything changed. And that’s when I started looking at my business completely differently where I said my real estate business, it’s gotta be focused on finding me.

assets and as a secondary concept producing cashflow to live off of. But your first thing you have to be focused on is rentals. And then I look at flips and then we look at listing the property. If that makes any sense.

John Harcar (12:41.047)
No, of course. Okay. that maybe kind of leads us into our topic a little bit of, you know, kind of the mindset shift that you teach. You know, why don’t many agents do that or go that route? I mean, even for this, you know, for this, even like to work with investors.

Blake Cory (13:02.114)
Yeah, so well, I mean, let’s answer the first question. Why don’t most agents think that way? Because they’ve been trained to think otherwise. I mean, you think about, I was a real estate coach for a company called Craig Proctor Coaching. It was one of the top real estate coaching companies in the country. We used to teach a lot about direct response advertising and buyer presentations, all this kind of stuff. That’s training somebody to have a real estate team that’s worth nothing 10 to 15 years later. It’s designed to sell a lot of houses.

but it’s never be designed to sell. And you get into business to create a business to sell or have an exit strategy. You know what I’ve uncovered John over the last three years that I’ve interviewed a ton of agents. I’ve spoken on stages where I’ve been able to ask audiences and do all this. Almost no real estate agent. I’ve only met I think less than a handful, maybe three or four where I said, what’s your exit strategy and show me. think about agents come into this business, loan officers.

real estate agents, even appraisers and different, they don’t have an exit plan. They get into business and really what they just bought is they just bought themselves a job, that’s it. That is exactly it. I have an uncle who’s been in the business 55 years in San Diego, 55 years licensed agent. 55 years, he’s 76, 77 years old, he got in his early 20s, here he is, right? He rents a home.

John Harcar (14:12.055)
Exactly.

John Harcar (14:17.463)
Oh geez, it in, oh, agent, 55 years, wow.

Blake Cory (14:29.228)
rents a town home and has no rental properties and leases his car, still said, he still has to go out and sell houses. He’s still going, and I said, that is not gonna be me. And that is not gonna be me. And so when I talk to agents all the time, you know, I did a Facebook Live inside of our community yesterday. You would be shocked how many people were in there saying, my broker, my office manager, and my real estate coach never talked to me one time about buying real estate.

never showed me the strategy to buy real estate. Because if you think about it, John, as a broker, and I was an independent broker owner for nine years, we want agents to be our mules. We want them to be out there going out, selling houses, and creating cash flow for us as the broker, right? We don’t want them to retire. Because if they retire, we lose our income stream. Does that make sense? Like, it’s, yeah.

John Harcar (15:04.663)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (15:08.843)
yeah!

John Harcar (15:18.731)
Yeah, 100%. Yeah. definitely. Why teach them what they could go in Excel at because they’re going to leave you.

Blake Cory (15:26.646)
And in addition to that though, most brokers and office managers and real estate coaches don’t even know. They don’t themselves have a portfolio of real estate. They themselves will flip the occasional property, but they’re not focused on it. And so here I was, it was a year ago when flying back from a speaking engagement in Seattle and I’m with my man Charles. So Charles has been with me five years. He’s helped me done all the videography, photography, all of this stuff. And

John Harcar (15:40.801)
Mm-hmm.

Blake Cory (15:55.906)
We’re coming back, we’re sitting on the plane, having a cocktail, and I said, we gotta teach agents something different. We gotta teach them how to buy the best and list the rest. And that was the beginning of what we now call the BBLR system. And that’s exactly what it is. I spent the last year with Charles, who he’s a licensed agent, been with me for six years. We sat down.

He looked at it from one end, I looked at it from another end, from a beginning agent to an experienced agent and said, let’s build a business model for agents that they can put in place and actually become investor agents, right? How they go from agent to investor. And that’s actually now what we call our community, right? Yeah, because that’s it. You have to think differently. You think investment first, sales second.

John Harcar (16:41.367)
Love it. It’s brilliant.

Blake Cory (16:48.854)
and sales is your last option just to create cash flow in, but you should be going out, like with my real estate team. I have 10 listing agents that go out. They go on listing appointments every single day. We’ve been blessed to get big contracts with companies that generate motivated sellers and say, hey, we’ll give them to you, just give us a referral fee if you list it or if you buy it. Cool, no problem.

Every time they go out, ready for this? This is gonna really change the mindset of listeners, especially who are in the real estate space as agents. They always go out with two offers from me. Offer number one, to buy it all cash. Offer number two, with seller financing. So they take an offer out every single time with seller financing from me. This is how I’ve picked up and just so, this is how much my life has changed, Three to four.

John Harcar (17:29.953)
Yep, cash offer.

John Harcar (17:33.953)
Mm, I love that.

Blake Cory (17:44.206)
seller financing deals I structure every single month for my portfolio. And we’re talking with beautiful cash flow. I just bought one the other day that the seller had a 2.625 % interest rate, right? But I didn’t assume it. We left it in place. We left that mortgage in place and we did what’s called a wraparound. The seller made me a loan and then at that point in time, 30 year fixed.

3.625 % interest rate, PITI, 2500 a month, 2509. So we’re paying the seller’s mortgage company, I think it’s Flagstar directly, and we’re giving him $150 a month in cash flow, and now we just put it up for rent for 3000. So we’re gonna get about $500 a month in positive cash flow, and it’s a deal that we’re like, this is amazing, you can’t find these anywhere.

And so it was just, it was a score. That was just one of them we did last month and we’re doing them every single month because for me, I’ll pay my sales agent a commission to find that deal, structure it and deal with the seller on my side because I just acquired another asset. And the best part is now we advanced depreciate it, do a nice cost segregation study, advanced depreciate everything into year one and offset the income that we’re making in our real estate team and in flipping properties.

John Harcar (18:48.502)
Yeah.

John Harcar (19:07.349)
When you’re buying them creative, are you giving any type of down payment?

Blake Cory (19:10.786)
Yeah, dependent upon seller situation, yeah. This guy actually had some equity position, so he was looking for 50 grand. And we got that check. I went out and actually raised the funds. I raised entirely, the entire thing from a real estate investor locally, where I said, hey, you put up the money, I’ll structure the deal, I’ll facilitate everything, I’ll handle property management, I’ll handle maintenance, I’ll handle all of that, and we’ll go in 50-50. He’s like, okay. So I got 50 % of that asset for nothing.

John Harcar (19:16.021)
Okay.

John Harcar (19:40.215)
Nice, he put the money in, I love that structure. So how did you learn how to do that? Just, I mean, trial by error, learning over years, I mean, how did that come about? Yeah, the creative seller finance.

Blake Cory (19:48.192)
on the creative seller financing side or raising capital.

Blake Cory (19:54.242)
Well, yeah, you know, I learned it back in the short sale days because you asked a question earlier, how did we overcome that? We did it back in the short sale days to avoid the FHA 90-day seasoning rule. But what happened is we took that vehicle, that land trust type vehicle that the attorneys designed, and we put it into today’s world to help avoid the due on sale clause. But all I did was say, hey, listen, I’ll buy your house. I’ll put some money in your pocket.

I’ll give you a monthly payment, like whatever it is to solve their problem, because that’s it. I just gotta solve their problem, whatever their problem is. Once I solve it, I can set my terms. But I said, from there though, interest rates are too high for me to be able to buy your home. Make me a mortgage. And that was it. And honestly, it came, the first two we did sucked. What I mean is like, we forgot this, we forgot that, we forgot this, we had to go back and fix it all up. But as you do more and more, you start to realize, no, like,

John Harcar (20:29.024)
Right, exactly.

Blake Cory (20:52.142)
we’ve got this thing figured out, we’ve got this thing locked in. So it’s taken me about, probably, it took me about a year to really make sure everything was streamlined and processed where I’m not involved anymore. So now, my agents go out, they bring an automatic offer that’s created. We use Rent-A-Meter, they have an API system that automatically puts in the monthly mortgage we’re willing to pay, which is the average rent for the marketplace. So these things are automated.

Got an acquisitions guide that’ll help facilitate things with the sales agents. And now I pretty much just underwrite all the deals that are coming through. It’s been a big transformation, yeah. It’s been a big transformation from three years ago not even doing these to now doing three to four every single month.

John Harcar (21:29.185)
That’s awesome.

John Harcar (21:39.039)
Yeah, no, mean, creative finance, think that, you know, more sellers are apt to do it if they knew more about it. And most realtors don’t know much about it. So over this whole time, you know, you being a business, you going through all these ups and downs, you’re going through 2008. What do you think your keys to success were? Or are?

Blake Cory (21:57.322)
Education number number. mean, first and foremost, I’m a lover of education. I may have dropped out of high school, but that’s because I was tired of reading Romeo and Juliet and doing geometry and all that. I fell in love with business at a really young age and I have every day wake up, go downstairs before the kids get up and start reading. I mean, that’s what it is about me. I mean, it’s actually part of the core values of all the companies that I own. Right now we have three.

And E, for education is part of all core values. What are you doing to educate yourself and grow? Because at the end of day, mean, if for those of you who are listening out there, you’re already one step ahead of everybody else because you’re listening to this podcast, right? You’re here, you’re learning, you’re growing. And so that’s part of the big thing is continuously growing. But you can’t be afraid to put money up to grow. And what I mean by that is when I wanted to learn how to be a real estate investor, I paid the money. Yeah, I read the books.

but I paid the money to people who were where I aspired to be. And then I followed the clues, right? My CPA, Casey Myers, God bless him, love him. He is a saving grace at Provision. They’re based out of Arizona. I’m in California, but he’s the best CPA to help me with my situation. And I found him because I read the book, Tax-Free Wealth, by Tom Wheelwright, another Rich Dad advisor, and he owned Provision at the time. He doesn’t anymore, but I had reached out.

You know, I just followed the clues, man. It was like the yellow brick road following me there. And so then I started to meet the right people, go to the right seminars, get connected. But I was also patient. Patience is a virtue in this. You have to be patient as an investor because if you’re trying to be fast and you’re trying to rush things and you’re trying to learn everything, you’re gonna make costly mistakes. You’re not going to, you gotta be here for the long term.

You gotta be here for the long term, so be patient. I lost more money when I forced deals and tried to go fast. I made more mistakes when I just tried to put things together. But at the same time, you gotta take action when things are in front of you. Success is just having all the right education and then having the opportunity and seizing that opportunity.

John Harcar (24:11.37)
love it. If folks are listening on here, they want to kind of get in touch with you, talk to you about your business, talk to you about the mindset part, talk to you if they’re agents and they want to kind of learn how to really shift their mind to achieve freedom. How’s the best way to get in touch?

Blake Cory (24:25.422)
Yeah, so I mean, the best way is if they’re in the real estate field and they, you’re an agent or you’re a mortgage loan officer, you wanna know more about this. I did a whole masterclass that I give away completely for free to people. They can go to www.bblrsystem.com and they get the free masterclass right there. It’s a little lengthy, but I go into great detail to provide a tremendous amount of value. Other than that.

YouTube, Instagram, those are the best ways to go ahead and get ahold of me. I’ll go ahead and send you my links where people can go there and follow me. We’re putting out content towards real estate agents specifically who want to become investors every single week on our YouTube channel, giving them free information all the time. But bblrsystem.com is the best way to get ahold of us.

John Harcar (25:10.006)
love it.

Okay, bblrsystem.com. I think I have cut some of your socials here. whatever we had, you can send me whatever you got. Guys, I’ll put it in the show notes so that way, when you guys wanna reach out, you’ll find the best way to get in touch with them. Blake, man, thank you very much for coming on here, man, sharing what you shared. I love your story. Guys, I hope you took notes and hope you enjoyed the show as well. And I’ll see you on the next one. Cheers.

Blake Cory (25:37.07)
All right, so you guys.