Unlock Real Estate Success: Reed Sircy’s Top Strategies for Investors

Stephen Schmidt (00:04.158)
Welcome to the show where we interview the nation’s leading real estate entrepreneurs It’s your host Stephen Schmidt and I’m back at it like a bad habit if you’re joining us for the first time Thanks for joining in where you’ve been at you’re about to add this to the regular listening docket of your podcast Selection and if you’re joining us for the second third or hundredth time, welcome back You already know you’re gonna get some value out of today’s episode and I got a real special treat for you guys I got a Nashville native in the house home of country music

He loves showing people around his hometown being on the water and he’s also an avid bourbon collector, which is near and dear to my heart. But he’s been in the real estate space for just over a decade now and he does a little bit of everything from retail side as an agent to some investing system development flips and everything in between. And we’re going to go into maybe some tips, tricks and tactics to blow your business up if you’re in the same space. So we’ll get right into it. But I got Reed Cerci in the house.

and we’re gonna get into a conversation. But before we do that, just remember here at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, and real estate entrepreneurs, two to five X their businesses, so they can build the businesses they’ve always wanted in order to live the lives they always dreamed of, which is what most of us get into this space for in the first place. So with that being said, Reed, welcome to the show.

Reed Sircy (01:21.804)
Man, Steve, thanks for having me, man.

Stephen Schmidt (01:24.176)
You bet, I’m glad you’re here brother. I haven’t actually had anybody in Nashville hop on the show. I’ve had South Tennessee, West Tennessee, all that, but I haven’t had anybody from the great city of Nashville on. I guess let me ask you this, we can kind of set the tone for the episode. What made you decide to get into real estate 10 years ago or so and how have things evolved to where you got to where you’re at today?

Reed Sircy (01:48.558)
So I’ve got kind of an interesting introduction into sales and then and then into real estate During well growing up my dad worked with a company called Southwestern advantage. He was their CFO and The so as a young child I would go on all the sales trips that all these really talented sales guys would go on and So didn’t know anything about the company

ended up going to college and I was trying to figure out what to do for a summer internship and ended up getting the only thing I really knew about Southwestern was you worked really hard and you made a lot of money and that was really it. Ended up going to an interview and as it turned out it was door to door sales, 80 hours a week, 100 % commission, outside of state and I remember sitting at that interview being like, oh, that sounds like a lot.

Anyways, the more I learned about it, the more I learned that all of these ultra, ultra successful people had come out of this. The statistics of millionaires that come out is just off the charts. And I understand completely why, because it’s really, really hard. And so when I was coming out of college or going into college, I learned really cutthroat sales. And it was really good experience for me. It really put me in positions where

Stephen Schmidt (03:12.007)
that.

Reed Sircy (03:15.264)
I had to grow rapidly, a lot quicker. If you imagine like getting better at a career, doing it so fast, so quickly, I progressed a lot faster. So I did that for four summers. My first summer I set a goal to make 10 grand. I came back with like 12. Second summer I doubled that and ended up working there for like five years. So it was a very intensive organization where

Stephen Schmidt (03:28.989)
Sure.

Reed Sircy (03:43.694)
I would basically walk in there, put my head down, go to work, and I’d walk out three years, or three months later, or 14 weeks later, and I mean, I’d be totally off the grid of just working really, really hard. They talked about 80 hours a week. I was doing probably closer to like 95. mean, every day was like the most ridiculous thing ever. But I remember finishing that, and I remember being like, I really, really love working with people.

Stephen Schmidt (03:57.821)
sure.

Stephen Schmidt (04:05.147)
Wow.

Reed Sircy (04:11.17)
But I hated this like no means next churn and burn type of sales. so Southwestern itself has got a whole slew of companies. So I went around and interviewed several of those. My dad said, why you go meet with a group of his friends? He came up with five people. I think I came up with five people. And I ended up meeting with a guy named Tony Stevens, who’s the dean of the business school at Lipscomb, where I went to college.

And Turny was a really good mentor and he started talking to me about real estate because I had kind of decided that I was going to start a roofing franchise company and bring it up from Chattanooga to start in Nashville, which I probably would have enjoyed doing too. But he said something that kind of was my light bulb moment for me. And he said, Reed, do you know how much it costs to buy 100,000 in stock? And I’m sitting there.

Stephen Schmidt (04:59.452)
Yeah.

Reed Sircy (05:10.574)
You know, at this time my dad’s a financial advisor, but I don’t think he’s ever charged me because he had transitioned that. He had started like a Raymond James branch and they just sold it. But anyways, he asked me that he said, how much does a hundred that how much does it cost to buy a hundred thousand stock? And I go commission. Maybe it’s a hundred and two. Like, I have no idea. He says, no, it’s a hundred thousand. He says, how much does it cost to buy a hundred thousand dollar house? And I go,

100,000?” He says, no, it’s 20 % and then someone else pays it off. And at that moment, that was like, hmm, that sounds really cool. I think I’d like to do that. And if I’m going to do that, why don’t I help my friends do that? And about a week later, I get a call from a guy named Kyle Feltz, who shot out to Bradford Real Estate. But he said, Reed, I’m starting a property management company. Why don’t you come work for us? And they ended up paying for my licensing. They gave me a lunch card, which

Stephen Schmidt (05:46.013)
You

Reed Sircy (06:09.358)
I’m so grateful for. I learned pretty quickly, like I could go eat and I was paid for it, or I could go take someone to talk about real estate and it was paid for. And it was the best way to get started in real estate. was an avid podcast listener to like bigger pockets. I’m sure a lot of your circle understands those, but it was just absorbing as much stuff as I could. And then I was also learning the game of property management where I go show all these rentals and I’d get the feedback.

from what people will pay for, what doesn’t do well, which really laid a great foundation for me understanding how to successfully manage rental properties. And so that’s kind of been my goal as of late is really just to acquire one every two years. And I tend to try to go for the nicer properties because I’ve managed really cheap, really, you know, not maybe section eight, but that.

and I’ve also managed the ones that are really nice. And I kind of realized I just wanted to skip that first level where most investors cut their teeth on. And it’s been surprisingly a great way to get started. In 2017, I bought my first house, which was a house hack. And it was pretty cool. I told my roommates, I was like, you guys are gonna pay 700 bucks. We ended up getting like a really cool house, maybe 2,500 square feet. So I had two of those guys and…

We had so much fun in there. Had a big bonus room with a projector. And then my mortgage on it was $14.50. And so I ended up putting money into the house and they ended up kind of taking care of the note. And still in that house today and really have so many memories and it’s kind of been a fun ride to live with your friends. Now it’s fun to not live with your friends. yeah. I think I rambled a lot.

Stephen Schmidt (07:59.837)
Sure. Yeah, there’s like that season of life where it’s awesome.

Reed Sircy (08:04.738)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so that’s kind of how I got into it. I worked in property management for about a year and then several of my friends that, you know, they always had time in college and I never had time because I was working and then they never had money, but I always had money. And then it kind of flip flopped where we could both go on a big trip and we went to Rio for the Olympics. And so I took about four weeks off, but…

At that point I was the only employee. After that I just jumped into real estate full time as an agent.

Fun stuff.

Stephen Schmidt (08:43.708)
Now, so this is really interesting to me because you, in talking to you for about the last half hour in total, you don’t seem like the kind of dude that would have made it in a hard close, hard sell environment. You’ve got just such a laid back personality to you, kind of like me. I struggle in that regard myself sometimes. But what were you guys actually selling with South? Was it like timeshares or what were you guys doing at the time?

Reed Sircy (09:09.87)
So there’s really like a couple of things that you can like really like tug on someone’s heartstrings, right? You’ve got health, you’ve got wealth, and then you’ve got education. And so we actually sold educational books. And it would be a lot of like study books for helping with like math or biology or college prep or like helping get your kids into like wanting to read and big picture books.

Stephen Schmidt (09:18.682)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Schmidt (09:26.277)
No kidding.

Reed Sircy (09:39.95)
Kind like a whole slew of things. So there’s so much science and advanced sales and psychology that went into what I studied of personalities and learning to make a first impression. And so I’ve just kind of always loved being around people. so door-to-door sales is the absolute craziest thing ever, and it is not easy. But you…

Stephen Schmidt (09:42.939)
Yeah.

Reed Sircy (10:09.322)
You get a lot of temps and so you just naturally get better over time. so, I mean, was just, I don’t even know how to explain it, it’s just the craziest thing every single day. But.

Stephen Schmidt (10:21.468)
I mean, you you were talking 90 to 100 hour weeks, man, and that kind of brought back a little bit of trauma for me, dude. You know, it’s been a decade now for myself, but my first job outside of high school was I was actually laying pipe, working on a pipeline.

Dude, it was 6 a.m. to 7, 8 p.m. at night, seven days a week, sunup to sundown. And so to do that and not have to deal with people, I personally love people. mean, shoot, I was podcasting, you know what I mean? So this is natural to me. I could do this 90 hours a week, no problem. But…

But still to be in an environment like that where you’re knocking, you’ve got to keep your energy high and still, like you said, create that first impression. That’s a difficult, difficult thing to do. And it makes sense why people come out of that and are successful in their next field as well, right?

Reed Sircy (11:15.606)
Yeah, it’s just one of those things that you just, you know, you kind of, the best people in the world are at sales are the high level sales, right? You’ve got your financial advisors, you’ve got real estate, you’ve got banking services, different things like that. You you talk about like mergers and acquisitions of.

you know, someone buying a hundred million dollar property or a company, right? But most of those guys are extremely talented, but most of the salespeople we interact with are the retail guys. Like, you you’re going and buying a sport coat or something or, you know, they’re not always as talented. the best salespeople, they don’t make it difficult. It’s building relationships and finding a need and…

Stephen Schmidt (11:52.166)
Yeah.

Stephen Schmidt (11:56.06)
you

Reed Sircy (12:02.138)
With the door-to-door stuff, that was pretty crazy. So you’ve to learn how to connect and really create a want. So I’m now grateful to not feel like I’m ever pushing anything. My job’s just to show stuff. Because all my people want to be there. They want to buy. And so a great salesperson is really just coaxing the path to get there.

Stephen Schmidt (12:24.77)
And to your point there, what I’ve found is, is every single salesperson that I’ve been around that was a top top dog, best in the business, the best closers, I’ve always found that those people, although there is, you know, something to be said about the, you know, the push, it’s always the people that look to serve people the most. Like those typically are the ones that are the best at it. You know what I mean? So I’m with you on that. So.

Reed Sircy (12:51.554)
You know, it’s interesting when you talk about like, it’s just something. I mean, you just kind of randomly showing up. that’s probably what it is. Sorry. You know, I forget what his name, the guy that turned out to be such a fraudster, but was the guy that was like, me this pen, you know? Do you remember that Wolf on Wall Street? Yeah, Jordan Belfort.

Stephen Schmidt (12:53.07)
And door to door,

Stephen Schmidt (12:58.766)
I think it’s that delay that’s getting us.

Stephen Schmidt (13:05.391)
Now go ahead.

Stephen Schmidt (13:17.457)
Belfer. Yeah, Jordan Belfer.

Reed Sircy (13:21.218)
The behind the scenes of that video was, he was always asking these guys, me this pen, sell me this pen. But the real intention behind it was he wanted people to say, how long you been looking for a pen? Trying to find if you’re the right person to talk to. so that’s what we do in real estate is we try to find the people that are looking for this and so help them find what they’re looking for. So it’s not really meant to go be selling.

Stephen Schmidt (13:36.208)
Right.

Stephen Schmidt (13:39.707)
Yeah.

Stephen Schmidt (13:47.162)
Man, I think you bring up a great…

Reed Sircy (13:51.49)
Yeah, not to be selling everything. Sorry, there’s a little bit of delay, I guess.

Stephen Schmidt (13:56.124)
No.

You’re good man I think you bring up a really great point with that because even when people study that video like from Wolf of Wall Street or whatever Versus if you see a video of Jordan running a live training people still look at her and like oh well here Write your name on a napkin all these like gimmicks, right? But when you see him actually training on it and somebody’s like, you sell me this pen? Like he asked those questions like are you like how long have you been in the market for a pen? What do you use your pen for? What is this? What is that? Because he’s trying to

all that information to figure out what the angle of how he’s gonna be able to serve you and place that product in a place that you have a need for. And so I think it’s really interesting because most people just assume, and I think Hollywood has done us a disservice on the sales side that we’re always out to like get people, right? But again, it goes back to that same exact point. Like the more questions you ask, the more you can understand the position someone else is in, the better that you can actually serve them and help solve their problem, which is what sales really is at the end of the day.

Reed Sircy (14:54.978)
Yeah, we would always call it like pre-approach. You’re just trying to learn about your person to figure out if they’re good candidate. Because if I have a family that’s coming through and we got a husband and wife and they’ve got one baby on the way and I’m trying to sell them like a quadplex or something.

that they’re gonna live in, that doesn’t make sense, right? They’re looking for a nice neighborhood of the school, right? They were trying to create that type of environment. Now, there’s something to be said about selling them a quadplex of like, this could pay for your kids’ college down the road. Or when the income coming in will help you save some money on taxes and build wealth, like…

Our job as agents is really just to listen for what people are looking for and help them find that. And I find that a lot of times people will specialize in one particular thing and they’ll be well-rounded. But that’s the great thing about being in the industry so long, like you become talented at all these different things. And so it’s really just listening for what people are looking for so that we can help connect them. So, yeah.

Stephen Schmidt (16:04.859)
Yeah, I 100 % agree with you on that, man. So let me ask you this, let’s transition to a little bit of real estate talk, real estate biz here. I know that’s another topic we both enjoy talking about a lot. What’s like your niche or strategy? I know you have kind of a split business with part retail, part investor. What do you like more? If you had to only do one, would you only do retail or would you only do investing?

Reed Sircy (16:31.246)
Well, I guess the proper answer is it depends, right? So like what my favorite thing is, is looking at good leverage, right? So if you compare two different things, you’ve got a owner-occupant versus an investment, right? An owner-occupant, you’re gonna be able to put down 0%, maybe 1%, or 3 to 5, right? An investment, you’re typically looking at 15, you know, maybe you’re doing hard money and

you know, you’re doing a burr or something kind of crazy like that. But the average person, I try to turn them from a retail buyer to an investor because realistically in my mind, some of the best rentals are the ones that you want to live in and you can charge a premium for, right? I mean, you have properties that are like a tiny bedroom, tiny closet, bad area town.

versus the one where, think about this as whoever’s listening, it’s like the house that you have right now. That’s probably a better rental property, especially because if you’re living in it now, that means that you bought it several years ago. Now we just came off the craziest high of real estate from everything that happened in 2008 to really even 2022 is maybe, 23 is maybe the peak, but realistically, you’ve probably got a low interest rate, right?

So I love teaching people, why don’t you go live in something, tweak it up, tune it up, paint the cabinets, change out the countertops, repair whatever needs to be done, and then turn that into a rental property. And if you can go do a HELOC and pull out your capital before you move, that’s your down payment on your next house. And you do that three or four times, and you have those properties eventually paid off one day.

They’re probably in better neighborhoods, they’re gonna appreciate better, they’re gonna rent for more, you’re gonna have probably less issues than like really crappy duplex and I tend to think of like Memphis. You could go buy crazy deals. The average person is not gonna get into these all crazy intensive real estate things. So I love teaching people how to do that and then how to help them have three or four houses.

Reed Sircy (18:53.314)
So I love teaching people the real estate investment side and really the best way to do that is go house hack a couple times or, you know, maybe after that you start doing some crazy stuff but the most important thing to get started isn’t to have this crazy knockout deal. It’s really to have a good experience so that you’ll do it again. Because if you run into a bad experience that’s too complicated at the beginning, you will not do it again.

Stephen Schmidt (19:14.701)
Keep up.

Reed Sircy (19:18.702)
Right, so that’s the goal is to kind of teach people slowly and surely how to step their foot in the door. And then I teach people how to manage properties and lease them. I don’t do it for people, but I kind of help facilitate. So long answer there, but that’s what I love doing.

Stephen Schmidt (19:20.165)
right?

Stephen Schmidt (19:34.469)
Totally. Yeah, you know, that, no, that’s perfect. That’s perfect. I was actually with David Green, who formerly with BiggerPockets probably three weeks ago. And I was talking to him about like, man, like this is kind of where I’m at. Me and my wife, you know, we’re looking at, at really starting to buy and hold our own properties. But with the volatility in the market right now, we’re really just not sure what the best.

The best way of going about that is going to be since we don’t have the ability to be full-time real estate professionals. She’s raising kids, I’m working.

in a multitude of aspects. And so where we’re at right now, let’s say we’re not going to go start a flipping company, even though we have some wholesale stuff, we look for like sub two deals. But if we were to do it and scale it a little slow over the next few years, what would you do? And he said the exact same thing. He’s like, dude, you’ve got four kids. mean, I would tell somebody that’s single, go buy a duplex house hack that way. But goes for you five bedroom house, and then live in that for a year, get out of it, move to your next five bedroom house, and then rent each room out by the room because that’s

gonna up your cash flow because right now cash flow in a long-term rental it’s kind of hard to do based on the rates and everything else. So to your point though having that good experience on the first purchase that you actually live in then gives you the the springboard to go do more of it right.

Reed Sircy (20:59.0)
Yeah, because realistically what I see is people are living in their house from anywhere between two to seven years, right? Two to seven years is plenty of time for appreciation and everything else to catch back up. And then at that point, you probably do have a little bit. Now, you’re in what part of Texas?

Stephen Schmidt (21:20.004)
So I’m actually in Kansas, interestingly enough. And part of the reason we haven’t bought a house is because we do have an absolutely stupid deal. We’re paying about 50 % less than market rate for the place that we live in right now.

Reed Sircy (21:21.954)
Kansas. Okay.

Reed Sircy (21:30.402)
Yeah. And so in situation like that, maybe you want to stay there for a long time. Maybe you’re better off investing in a fund where I’ve got a buddy that’ll do 12 % returns on people, where he’ll go do all the real estate stuff and then you guys can just sit back and collect. But eventually you’ll get to a point where you want to change. Maybe you start building a house. You could do one of those 5 % down bill loans.

Stephen Schmidt (21:47.299)
Right.

Reed Sircy (22:00.718)
and you live there for two years and then you go sell it. Two years after that, don’t have to pay 500, you know, you’re exempt from 500,000 capital gains. It’s really just at the beginning, just kind of jumping into it. The sub two deals are crazy. I just did my first one on it and it’s crazy awareness of like, wow, this is pretty cool. So the house I just bought is 500,000 and I…

Stephen Schmidt (22:02.842)
Sure.

Stephen Schmidt (22:11.844)
Totally.

Reed Sircy (22:29.634)
basically put $12,000 down as an investment. if you look at leverage, it’s great. its margins are really tight. It doesn’t really make any money, but it’s going to be really good for a cost segregation study when, I guess, we just passed the House, or passed the Senate, now it’s got to go back to the House and officially pass there before it gets signed. But that’ll be really great for all real estate people and hopefully jump starts our economy, which we need a little action.

So.

Stephen Schmidt (23:00.634)
I’m The big beautiful bill hoping that goes through. So let me ask you this and we’ll kind of end on this note. So what are some mistakes that are incredibly avoidable that you see new investors that aren’t just getting into a home that’s a single family, they don’t have any intention of doing real estate other than just being a byproduct of appreciation? What are some of the biggest mistakes that you see people making when they get started as like an investor that are avoidable?

Reed Sircy (23:30.93)
probably just not being aware of the cost on certain things. you know, I’m looking at my perspective. just finished the second renovation on a 4,200 square foot house. and I just had no idea the difficulty that that was going to bring. and I didn’t have like a really good team. so having like a, you know, especially if you’re investing.

you need to have a really good contractor, which I ended up finding a fantastic contractor. In fact, I’ve found several since then, but going into that without a really good team is really tricky. And then also, I hate to say it, but there’s a lot of desperate agents right now, and they’re just trying to sell you something. And so it’s really good to be going down the right path, because you can, if …

I heard a quote the other day, if the road to wealth was hard work, then the donkey would own the farm, right? So you can work really hard at something, but you’re not doing the appropriate things. And so just make sure that you’re listening to people that you trade places with. And I think that that’s a really good tip on making sure you’re doing the right thing.

Stephen Schmidt (24:43.13)
Hmm.

Reed Sircy (24:59.32)
So just surround yourself with good people and you know the great thing about real estate is you could probably buy like the worst deal and if you hold it long enough it eventually will turn into a good product. So but I think I always tell people make sure you know where you want to be and work backwards.

Stephen Schmidt (25:17.4)
Yeah, super smart. The whole principle of beginning with the end in mind. Yeah, absolutely.

Reed Sircy (25:24.472)
So, but yeah, man, I appreciate you having me on. If you ever in Nashville hit me up, we’ll go pour a couple of drinks of tall brown water and super excited to be here. I really, really appreciate all the time.

Stephen Schmidt (25:40.856)
Well, you got it, man. I’m glad you made it on the show and we had to have we got to have a conversation for all of the fine folks. Listen, do this for us. Drop where they can connect with you for more. Learn more about what you’re working on, man. This is your chance to plug what you’ve got going on.

Reed Sircy (25:57.388)
Yeah, my Instagram handle is realtorreed, realtor underscore read. then feel free to shoot me an email. Reed at bradfordtn.com. Love to connect. If you’ve got investors that are looking for stuff, I’d love to teach them about sub two deals, investments, or house hacking. We find stuff all the time. And right now there’s so many opportunities and I think we’re just about to kind of hit the bottom and then start climbing our way back. So.

exciting things ahead of us in real estate world.

Stephen Schmidt (26:27.406)
You bet.

We’ll go connect with them for more folks, show them some love from the Real Estate Pros and the Investor Fuel community. We appreciate y’all listening to the show and we’ll see you in the next episode. Thanks for being here, Reid.

Reed Sircy (26:38.968)
Thanks man. See you guys.