Why Cheap Virtual Assistants Fail in Real Estate and How to Hire Better

Dave Homyak (00:00)
Well, I don’t need to have any vision on the cabins because I sold them all because I expect the prices to continue to go down. Right now what you have in the Smokies is you have everybody realized they could build cabins cheaper than they could buy them, so it was easy to make money as a developer. I became a developer.

Scott Bursey (01:52)
Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast. Today we’re thrilled to welcome Dave Homyak of the Rockstar VAs Dave is an expert on helping real estate professionals build truly scalable operations by leveraging high performing virtual assistants to conquer major growth bottlenecks. Welcome to the show, Dave.

Dave Homyak (02:12)
Thanks for having me, Scott.

Scott Bursey (02:13)
It is our pleasure. Dave, for our listeners who may not be familiar with your journey, could you tell us how your career began and where you’re at now?

Dave Homyak (02:21)
Sure, I was full of anxiety and fear. I’d always had an interest in real estate. I thought it was fascinating, but I was afraid to buy anything. What if the roof leaks and I can’t figure it out? What if the plumbing leaks? So bottom line is, it was early 50s and I had only bought a primary residence, know, one at a time, never kept anything, never rented anything. And I decided I was gonna replace my engineering income with real estate, decided to do some… ⁓

Decided to do some research ended up looking on bigger pockets decided the best way to do it would be through buying log cabins in the smoky mountains. That was a really, really good choice at the time. ⁓ and, and just in case any of your listeners are thinking about, want to invest in real estate, but I don’t know what to invest in. It’s what will allow you to sleep at night. Right? Like could I bought apartment buildings? Could I have done really well? Probably.

Would I have slept as well at night? No, I like for whatever reason I felt comfortable with buying. I’ll just, you know, I felt comfortable with buying log cabins with a three in the front of the price, 400,000 too much, 200,000 not big enough. Three, three to three 90, you know, yes. Don’t I not logical. It wasn’t based on math or whatever, but that, you know, so bottom line is if you’re going to get into real estate, do what makes you feel comfortable. Obviously research it. Um,

Scott Bursey (03:39)
Any.

Dave Homyak (03:45)
As we were discussing before we went live, Scott, those cabins ended up, I didn’t know what to compare them to. Um, and I didn’t realize that 50 to 65 % cash on cash was abnormal. And I’m just like, Oh, I’ll get three this year and I’ll take a buyout from General Motors, which I ended up doing. And then I was like, Oh, I’ll just buy one a year. Well, here’s the problem with that philosophy.

Is they’re going to be going up in value quite a bit because there’s other people that are happy making 40 percent and then 35 percent and then 30 percent cash on cash and then 20 so everything I bought One of the cabins went up over a hundred thousand in the first year and I put 35,000 down and I’m like, this is pretty I’m pretty good at this stuff not knowing this is like an anomaly and everything’s lining up right? ⁓ yeah, so that was a thing and then

Scott Bursey (04:36)
⁓ You

Dave Homyak (05:28)
You know, one of the things, so one of the things I did wrong is I didn’t buy a lot. When you find something that’s throwing off stupid cash on cash, buy more. Pretty, pretty safe. The other thing, well, two other things. One that I did right was I would evaluate my properties at the end of the year. And the first year I bought a five bedroom, a four bedroom, a three bedroom, three bedroom, five bedroom did best, three bedroom did the worst. Still made a profit on the three bedroom, sold it.

Used a 10 31, which is a tax deferred exchange and bought an eight bedroom with that. And then same thing for bedroom. sold more than doubled in value in like two and a half, three years, and then bought a absolute killer five bedroom with insane views. So everything, you know, so bottom line is evaluate what’s working, evaluate what isn’t working. Don’t put the effort into not what’s working. And then the third thing that we had discussed before we went live is, ⁓ when

It, well, we didn’t actually say this, but if here’s your, here’s your advice from Dave. If you buy anything and it triples in value in five years, sell half, sell all, sell something. Don’t, don’t say, it’s just going to keep going up. It has to, right? Like, so, and bottom line is what Scott and I were discussing before we went alive is the Smokies was a unique market because COVID hits all the airplanes. Quit flying.

Everybody has the same amount of money because they have the stimulus. So now they’re outbidding each other for the nightly rate. This is all 2020 hindsight. This was not my clear crystal ball at the time. So what used to be a 300, $350 a night cabin is now a 500, $550 a night cabin. Everybody’s making money hand over fist. The prices of the cabins are going through the roof. People start building because you can build cheaper than you can buy. That would have been a good time to unload a couple cabins.

didn’t and I still did fine because I got in fine but yeah that was quite the whipsaw on prices and right now prices are going down. They’re probably stabilizing some but they’re probably down at least 25 % from the peak maybe 30 % and if anybody does tax math you could have easily sold paid the taxes not had to do anything and had more money than if you sold it now and again the you know the nightly rates are going down so the

the amount of money you’re able to pull out in the cash on cash is a little bit lower, especially with the people with the higher interest rates. yeah, that’s my, that’s your quarter million dollar education in five minutes or less.

Scott Bursey (07:51)
That’s a great education and great words. Let me ask you this Dave, what are some of your strengths right now and what’s your vision as far as your cabins are concerned?

Dave Homyak (08:03)
Well, I don’t need to have any vision on the cabins because I sold them all because I expect the prices to continue to go down. Right now what you have in the Smokies is you have everybody realized they could build cabins cheaper than they could buy them, so it was easy to make money as a developer. I became a developer.

Anybody wants to reach out if you want the most insane views in the Smokies, we have a ridge of a mountain. There’s four lots on it. It’s just absolutely insane. Um, but yeah, there’s a lot of people that were building cabins and the interesting thing is like, if you’re at a 3 % interest rate, you can hold the land. It’s not that bad, but it, you know, 8, 10 % interest, which is what you’re paying on dirt 12%. You, you have to keep building and blow them out at cost if necessary. And obviously you’re trying to make some money, but then you just have all this extra product that keeps hitting the market.

So there is one management company that if anybody’s in the smokeys and they need to get the best management company, these guys do their own. Erd and E beyond pricing price labs. They pull their own data because they’re managing 700 properties and they’re making their own pricing model and they’re actually doing better now because they know exactly when to drop the price to grab everybody’s B and it’s before two weeks out. So yeah, that’s just.

So bottom line is I think the question was what am I doing well and what am I doing with the cabins? Sold all the cabins because I believe that the cabin values are gonna go down at least for the ones that I owned. If you have a really high priced cabin, know, million and a half, two million dollar cabin, you should be able to do well because that’s still a rarer commodity and supply and demand still applies. If you have a plain Jane run in the mill cabin, it’s gonna be a lot harder. If you can put in a pickleball court, you can make some money and I’ll do the pickleball craze.

the cabin I sold, the last cabin I sold, they’re like, there’s enough land to put in a pickleball court. can do it. one of the other things that Scott and I were talking about is, know, one of my strengths right now is patience, which it doesn’t feel like a strength. feels like I should be doing more. I don’t sit well on couches, but basically there’s a lot of guys I know that are high performing and they’re used to a certain level of performance. You’re to making a certain level of money.

And right now they’ve had to drop a lot more in marketing dollars, a lot of other stuff. And sometimes that works out well and other months, you know, they break even after spending a lot of money, like a lot of money, like small house money a month. And sometimes they lose money. And it’s like, I’m like, man, that looks like a lot of effort. And luckily I’m in a position where I can kind of sit back and wait for.

An opportunity that hits my buy box, which my buy box hasn’t shifted. It isn’t like it’s harder now. I still have to keep moving. I still have to get off the couch. No, I’m like, I can sit back and wait for a good opportunity to come. know that something will come. we talked about what that might be. I have no idea. I talked to a lot of people. One of my favorite questions is, you know, what excites you right now? And somebody is going to tell me something that either is just awesome and I go in with them, or I add a twist to it and we both do it together with a little.

making it even a little better, a little bit more profitable, a little bit more value add. ⁓ Yeah, that’s kind of where my head is right now.

Scott Bursey (11:42)
if you could elaborate a little bit more on the virtual assistant aspect of things.

Dave Homyak (11:47)
Sure, ⁓ yeah so I, a lot of the stuff I do just happens by accident. So I did not plan remotely on having a virtual assistant placement company. The last thing I did on purpose was buy three cabins and the smokeys in 2018 trying to replace my engineering income with real estate. I was able to take a buy-up from General Motors 11 months after that. I just wanted to help people. That was my only goal.

I ended up getting on a couple podcasts and I said, this is exactly how I do it. I just wanted to let you know you can do it too. So I said, I went to bigger pockets in these forums, looked at these people, did all this stuff. This is the amount of money being generated and I’m ranking my cabins. The unintended consequence of that was people started to reach out to me and said, Hey, can you help me pick the best ones? And I said, I was not expecting that. That was not remotely my goal. And I said,

I can and I’m actually I would be a better pick than you if you’re if you know I’ve already seen these the areas of locations a lot of stuff part of picking is is is doing the

Part of picking is doing the math of which ones are gonna be most profitable, which ones are gonna generate the most revenue, which ones aren’t. So I ended up getting a virtual assistant to help me do all that math. What ended up happening from that is she was really skilled. She had over 10 years experience at the time. ⁓ A good thing, a good first conversation with a virtual assistant is when they say, do you need help with?

And you say, need help with my email. And they say, what do you need done with your email? And you say, I need these three or four things. And they very patiently nod and go, we could do those things or we could do these other five things. But if you want to do those things that you talked about that aren’t as efficient, we can do that too. Right? So that’s, that was the discussion. That was my very first discussion with my first VA. I started to tell my friend, she’s absolutely amazing. You need people with a lot of experience and.

three separate friends at a certain lunch I’d go to once a month said, can you get me a virtual assistant? Can she find me one like her? And I said, I think so, I don’t know. And basically we ended up having three virtual assistants placed with my friends. And the discussion at the end was always the same. What do I owe you? And I go, nothing, it’s fine, don’t worry about it. And then another friend, his name’s Brent said, you.

do realize you have a virtual assistant placement company and you should start charging for this. And I, no, I didn’t know. Thank you very much for pointing that out. So bottom line is we’ve placed over 200 in the last three years. ⁓ Our model’s a lot different. A lot of people are like, what’s the least you can pay? ⁓ One of my most interesting calls from a potential client was, I’ve had five virtual assistants, I’ve had to fire them all, why would I get one from you?

And my answer is how much time did you spend training five virtual assistants to only fire them? How much, you know, that sounds like a horrible use of time. How about you pay them a little bit more and you get the cream of the crop, right? The people that are teaching you what to do with your email, how to set up your scheduling, how to do all the other stuff, right? So that’s what my company that happens to be the TheRockstarVAs.com. ⁓ that’s who we provide.

Scott Bursey (15:48)
Thank you for being on the show. This has been awesome.

And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. If you found value in today’s episode, please make sure you’re subscribed. Until next time, keep your standards high and your vision clear. We’ll see you in the next episode, everyone.