Why Human Connection Still Wins in Real Estate Investing and Sales

John Lee (00:00)
Yeah, and I think the human impact is becoming more important. It never left, obviously, but it’s going to be more important as AI takes over and people are more automated in their workflow and everything like this. And again, like I said, I use Claude a million times a day trying to help my workflow, but I’m still talking to people and to have the conversations. It almost surprises people now where you pick up a phone and call them instead of sending an email.

Cody Crabb (02:01)
and welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m Cody Crabb with Investor Fuel. Today I’m joined by John Lee, a Florida-based investor with 10 plus years across flips, wholesale and rentals. And now he’s launching The Closing Class to bring a more human approach to coaching

Cody Crabb (02:17)
in a saturated market. I’m really excited about this one, John. Thanks so much for joining us.

John Lee (02:22)
I appreciate you having me. I’m real happy to be here.

Cody Crabb (02:24)
Yeah, so just to start out, I’d love to hear, how did you get into real estate? It’s usually, I always say it’s one of two things. It’s you read Rich Dad Poor Dad, or you ask the richest person you know, how did you get your money? And then that’s what they it really said real estate. So if it’s not one of those, which one was it?

John Lee (02:41)
Well, kind of neither. I didn’t have a chance to do anything else. My dad is in real estate. I’m a lifer. And, you know, I like to tell people the first memory I have of almost anything is sitting in my dad’s office in the early 90s. I was five. And back then they actually had Rolodexes where you had to flip through. And I had to find people’s names so he could call to look for deals. And then they had an actual MLS book. They didn’t have the MLS online or Zillow or anything like that.

So I had to flip through and find the page of whatever property he was looking at. So that’s almost my first memory as a human, but I called that my first job. So I’ve been in real estate minus a couple years right out of college where I worked as a tour business, but I’ve been in real estate my whole life. genetically, I just don’t know how to do a nine to five.

I’m kind of the one of the guys, whatever the saying is, I’ll work 80 hours a week to work for myself instead of 40 for somebody else, something like that. But that’s how we got into it. And it’s been a ride. I was in college and just out of college when the crash came and then been through COVID and everything like that. So.

Cody Crabb (03:55)
Yeah, you’re

like, the timing of all that is like prime for overcoming challenges, would say. Your career right out of college during the…

John Lee (04:04)
man.

It’s

you just see the market go like this and then COVID happens and everything kind of goes to shambles and all my friends start calling me like my house didn’t appreciate 25 % this year. What’s going on? But it’s yeah, it’s been fun. It’s been a definitely a an experience and we’re looking for more. I mean, that’s that’s the whole point of this.

Cody Crabb (04:27)
So ⁓ I’d love to hear kind of what made you want to start The Closing Class. ⁓ I wouldn’t say it’s a pivot, because you’re still very much investing, you said. But it’s certainly like you’re kind of maybe shifting focus a little bit. So what kind of brought that on?

John Lee (05:30)
It’s, you know, I think it was kind of a long time coming. I moved to a town right out of a couple years out of college where I knew nobody. did it for a girl who is now my wife. And so I made the right move there.

Cody Crabb (05:43)
The good ending. was like, when you said for a girl, was like, for his wife.

John Lee (05:45)
I’m laughing.

Yeah,

it worked out. But you know, I was an agent. I still am licensed. I still do agency. But with my experience growing up, I actually ended up being one of the younger people on a team in our office, and but I ended up being kind of the person that people are that people came to. And you know, how do we negotiate this? What do you think of this? That kind of thing, especially on people trying to buy rentals or the newer agents like how do I handle an open house? That kind of thing.

So from a young age, just having been in the business, people that were making a second career or that wanted to give it a try or something like that, they would come to me. And it’s always been kind of a mentoring atmosphere for myself. And I loved it. I actually loved helping the other agents over clients, really. it turned into, long story short,

I ended up being in a recruitment role for a national brokerage for a while. ⁓ and really loved that. Tried to grow a brokerage that came into the city I was in and did that and enjoyed it. And then COVID hit. And I just said, you know, I don’t know if I can do the corporate or the agency life anymore. And I pivoted to focus on my own investments during COVID. And I still do that. I still do multiple different other investments.

Manufactured homes, single family flips wholesale. We have some retail centers in Georgia, that kind of thing. We have a 17 unit multifamily. So I’m still, I’m thick in it. And I just ordered a manufactured home this morning. know, if you’ve never ordered a home on the internet, I don’t know if you’ve lived yet. ⁓ But that’s a whole, that’s a whole nother section. But the closing classes turned into during COVID, there were so many people that were lost with everything being online, banks shutting down.

Nobody knew what to do. Canceling contracts. What is the law? What is all this? You know, how do I get my escrow? Nobody knew what to do and you know, frankly I didn’t either, but people would come to me and. It just kind of turned into, you know, let’s see kind of how this goes and initially it started as let’s let’s open a brokerage in. Try to keep it local and bring in the people that we already know and mentor them into into something we can do within the neighborhoods.

And that’s turned into why don’t we try to take it where, again, I keep referencing COVID just because it’s such a pivotal point in the world, but really in my business, in my life. And how can we take this and make it more reachable for everybody, really? And so I’ve got a partner, her name is Alex. She’s actually a friend and she was a client. And she does different investments than I do.

So she brings a different side. does a lot of short-term rentals in smaller multifamily things. So she’s kind of, you know, the yin and the yang of what I’ve got going on. And she’s much more bubblier than I am. So she kind of brings the whole attitude up and the fun and everything to it. But it’s turned into why would we keep it local when we can do everything like we’re doing on a Zoom or on a webinar or something like that and reach somebody and…

Seattle or reach somebody in Canada or reach somebody in Texas first just our little hyper local state. And that’s that’s kind of where it stemmed from and we’re you know, we’re new and we’ve got a few clients now and we’re working on them and we want to turn it into like you said in the intro, we want to kind of humanize what is turning into an AI world and we.

Cody Crabb (09:27)
Tell

me more about that. I want to know more about that for sure.

John Lee (09:30)
So I don’t want to discount what is going on in AI because I use Claude 90 times a day. And, you know, I will continue to do that and I’m sure things will continue to do that. And that will help with the business. But as things progress, I feel like having actual human conversations with people is becoming more and more impactful where you’re seeing these AI ads or these people that are doing the in your face things just to be salesy.

and you’re scrolling on Facebook or TikTok or Instagram or whatever. And that’s really all you see. And then you turn your TV on and all you see is commercials. So we’re being sold now more than any time ever in history. And it’s hard to shut off. mean, really the only time to shut it off is the six or seven hours you’re sleeping at night and then you’re right back to scrolling on your phone. I mean, I do the same thing.

Cody Crabb (10:22)
like, yeah, and that’s one of the last things you see is one of first things.

John Lee (11:00)
My first thing I don’t even get out of bed and brush my teeth in the morning. I’m scrolling on my phone. Exactly. So I mean, I’m a victim to it too. And but we just want to turn it back into I’m kind of an old school guy. Alex is is an old school girl and we want to turn it into how do we have conversations? How do we turn an investment business into a conversation business? How do we turn a new agent into a conversationalist where they don’t get lost in the shuffle where they can have?

maybe not a following, but a good client base that’s going to be loyal to them and create a lifestyle where they can feel comfortable and not have to be salesy and not have to be kind of in that panic thought mode all the time. So we want to get the new investor either their first rental or kind of clear their brain on what does their lifestyle. We filmed a YouTube video this morning on short-term rentals and Alex has one in North Carolina. She made it a destination for her family. So they decided

not to buy a rental locally, they said, where do we like to vacation? And it’s on a lake in the mountains. So they said, how are we going to pay for that? Well, the Airbnb about four months a year, it more than pays for everything that they’re doing. And then they can still use it as a family. So that turned from let’s buy a duplex and cashflow it and save it for the kids to a vacation home. So that’s the conversations that we want to have with people to make sure that they get all the information they need, but not too much.

and then calmly think about where do I want my life to go? You know, without having a scroll or without thinking somebody’s trying to sell them, just sit back and say, what do you want to do? Where do you want to be in a year, five years, 10 years? How do you want your work to look like? People say, I want to be a multimillionaire and I want all this kind of stuff. Some people just say I want a couple rentals and I want to make a couple thousand dollars a month and you know, I want to go fishing. And that’s, there’s, there’s

There’s a lot in between that. we just want to kind of therapy for lack of a better term is, is make sure people don’t forget the process and the lifestyle and get stuck in that grind and kind of the, forever panic mode of, got to move a million miles an hour because everything else seems like it is.

Cody Crabb (13:17)
And I think there’s a lot of discourse around, like you said, in the coaching world, know, maximize 10 X as much as you can, like as hard as you can. Like there’s so much of like people encouraging you or saying like, there’s no other choice. Like you have to do that or investing as well. People are advised to kind of just go as hard as you can. But I love the idea of you kind of decide what life you want first. Like you go, I just want to.

I just want to hang out with my kids and I want to work 10 hours a week from home and I want to then I want to go on vacation whenever I feel like it and just never miss anything with my kids. Like someone like that. I mean, that’s so much more achievable. Not only is it more achievable, but like not, it wouldn’t take much if you’re just like trying to replace an income. So that’s a really good point.

John Lee (14:06)
That’s the goal and it’s turned in from personal experience of me working 80, 90, 100 hours a week for other people, for somebody else’s paycheck. And it just burned me out. I’ve got three little kids and I don’t want to miss them growing up and I want to leave stuff to them.

I don’t want to go to work at eight o’clock in the morning and have to come home at five o’clock and then think about what are we going to do for dinner and everything like this and then wake up in the morning. I’d like some free time. I’m not the guy that’s going to work 20 hours a day for the next 20 years, but I want to work strategically so I can take the weekends off or I can take a Wednesday off and we can go on a trip, you know, whatever we want to do. and that’s what we want to tailor with the coaching or with the Closing Class.

It’s like you said, it’s lifestyle first and then work in business. And I think that’s important to stay in age.

Cody Crabb (15:06)
Sure. something else that you didn’t even mention, just going back to what you were talking about, where there’s just ads everywhere now, I think people are starting to get wise to it a little bit. like the ads don’t work as well as they used to because people see them everywhere. And it is it is like literally a reflex for me now to be like, add scroll. I don’t even don’t even watch it. Don’t even no matter how interesting it possibly is. I’m not watching that. Like it’s just not going to happen. So.

And there’s a lot of people, I know there’s a lot of people like me too. So the fact that you’re focusing on how you could make an impression is probably an even bigger deal now than it ever has been.

John Lee (16:27)
Yeah, and I think the human impact is becoming more important. It never left, obviously, but it’s going to be more important as AI takes over and people are more automated in their workflow and everything like this. And again, like I said, I use Claude a million times a day trying to help my workflow, but I’m still talking to people and to have the conversations. It almost surprises people now where you pick up a phone and call them instead of sending an email.

and you have a conversation and instead of four emails back and forth over the course of a day, you get an answer and you have a nice conversation and you make somebody’s day in a three minute phone call. And that’s, that’s, it’s not tips and tricks that we’re trying to teach people. It’s going back to the nineties where I grew up where, you know, you had to pick up the phone to call somebody. And if they didn’t answer, you didn’t know where they were, but you, you had the conversations, you know, and you weren’t

you said you weren’t constantly sold. it’s it’s just bringing back a human element to a business that really needs it. I mean, it’s a human business. People call it real estate, but when you’re looking at a house, it’s the biggest investment. It’s very personal. You know the agents need to understand that and they don’t. I don’t want them to have. The commission check in the back of their mind. I want them to have. This family is my friends. I’m going to hang out at this house. You know my kids are going to come to this house and play.

You know, I want that in their mind and people notice that people can tell that when you’re you’ve kind of people call it commission breath. When you’ve got commission breath, people can tell first when you’re relaxed and you say you never.

Cody Crabb (18:06)
That one, absolutely love that. is so good.

John Lee (18:09)
I don’t know, maybe people don’t, that’s what I’ve called it.

Cody Crabb (18:12)
I love that. I’ve never heard that myself, but I absolutely love that and will totally be stealing that. That is so good.

John Lee (18:18)
But people pick up on it. And for investors, we get so many people, friends now that are antsy to buy a rental or they’re saying, I’ve got a little bit of money, excuse me, I need to put it somewhere. You don’t need to put it somewhere. Let’s talk about what you want that money to do for you. And let’s talk about what you want in your lifestyle. Do you want to manage a short-term rental?

I know nothing about short-term rentals. know nothing about Airbnbs. I’ve stayed in a few and that’s it. And Alex is a guru, but I don’t want nothing to do with him. So we need have those conversations and say, what do you want to do? How much money do you have? How much work do you want to put into it? Do you want to hire people? That kind of stuff. Before you get into, I just got to buy something.

Cody Crabb (19:08)
And especially like being that intentional too. I mean that will save you so many headaches down the line just because I mean How many people do something like that because they have an opportunity? I’ll tell you I’ll tell you a quick story. It’s not about real estate I hate my sister-in-law was moving across the country. She was like I have an RV I have a big giant crappy RV is from like it was like a 1991 and She was like I need to sell it. This is like a few years ago. And so she’s like, oh

you know, what do you guys just want to sell it? You could just buy it from us and then just sell it immediately. It’ll be, and maybe you can even get some profit on it. And I’m like, cha ching. This is perfect. and I never was thinking, I was never thinking about getting an RV that had never crossed my mind ever. And that thing is, was cursed. It was expensive and big and ugly. And we had to put a ton of money into it. We lost like several thousand dollars into it. My point is

The reason that happened is because I was not, I was so blinded by an opportunity. I completely lost track of the what like I wouldn’t, if I’d thought about that for five minutes, I would have been like, this is a terrible idea. Yeah. So that’s, that’s the kind of lesson I feel like, I feel like you’re teaching too. Like not only like, do you want to go sell an RV? That’s something you know nothing about and take care of one and to do maintenance on one, even though you don’t know anything about them. Like that would have, those questions would have made me like,

John Lee (20:18)
No.

Cody Crabb (20:35)
Okay, yeah, maybe I shouldn’t do this. that’s the, I think that’s so valuable. People need to really have internal and external conversations like that a lot more in real estate for sure.

John Lee (20:46)
Yeah,

you can’t impulse buy real estate because it’s real hard to take that back.

Cody Crabb (20:51)
Possible, not good. No, don’t, that you don’t want to.

John Lee (20:55)
Be very

expensive, whether money wise or time wise or, you know, headache wise.

Cody Crabb (21:01)
That’s so true. So I’d be curious to know, like, what kind of mistakes do you see in that vein? Like people getting involved too fast, like what are they doing wrong? Is it like me with the RV, like they get blinded by the opportunity or is it something else?

John Lee (21:17)
I can’t say they’re doing anything wrong because a lot of people, there’s a lot of education out there and real estate is obviously everybody wants to talk about it in some capacity that, I’ll just use flips as an example, because it’s kind of, you know, fairly widely known and people have seen all the shows and all that kind of stuff, but they get so excited on, you know, I see a flip and it’s going to cost this much down and our payments going to be this and it’s going to cost this much to fix it. And we get to pick out new doors and we get to pick out the floors and

They just got excited about the opportunity of doing it, which is awesome. I mean, they should be, but they don’t look at the cost that it takes. If it takes six months longer to sell than you thought it would, or if you run into a leak that you didn’t detect in the inspection or you know, the roof is bad that they miss and that happened with with Alex actually in the property that her first property that she bought with me. The inspector missed the roof and it cost him. 15 grand and.

That was an inspector that I had used for years and for whatever reason he just missed it. And you know that can happen to anybody, but they had that planned for. And you know they had made an offer based on the worst case scenario. So it’s I don’t know that people do anything wrong. I’m sure there there are, but the majority of people at least that we see. They just get too excited. It’s like puppy syndrome. They’re just like.

my gosh, my gosh. And they just they lose this. They lose the site of. That it’s it’s you know you’ve got to work everything out on the Excel spreadsheet. You don’t work it out in the tile aisle of Home Depot and you know they and that’s that’s where they get into trouble. That’s a good example is people will go in and say you know we’ll work with him and they’ll say you’re going to budget you know $253 a foot for tile and they’ll go in and they’ll go OK cool and then.

You know, that’s not fancy tile and they’ll go in and they’ll go see some imported thing from Italy or whatever that’s 12 bucks a foot and they’re going to go, I want that. And then, you know, an $8,000 tile job turns into a $30,000 tile job in a house that isn’t going to support it. So that’s money that they just don’t get back. And that’s where people get in trouble is just picturing that, you know, maybe they’re going to live there.

If it’s a rental or a flip versus somebody else is going to live there and they have to make it for the area. There’s time for that fancy tile and spots, stuff like that. But for the average person that I’m around that’s flipping an average house, there’s a very, very tight budget, especially I’m in Florida with insurance and taxes and everything. There’s a very tight budget for people flipping now. the market really hasn’t

come down much since COVID. And, you know, so people are still asking high prices and the demand is still there in certain areas. So there’s not a lot of spread on something that could take you six, eight, nine months to complete. And that’s with zero mistakes. So it’s people just getting excited and not really, I mean, we’ll call it the RV syndrome now. I’m going to change it instead of puppy syndrome. It’s the RV syndrome.

⁓ They just they get excited about doing something and they just say, let’s, you know, screw it. Let’s do it.

Cody Crabb (24:48)
Screw it and let’s do it is like the best and worst thing you could say. Like sometimes it’s great and then it also sometimes just completely…

John Lee (24:56)
I mean, I love the attitude, but look, you know, so those are our favorite people to work with because they’re, mean, they’re gung ho, they’re ready to go. They’ve done research, maybe they’ve overused. Yeah. And they just, they just, you know, a little, little rain pulling.

Cody Crabb (25:01)
Yep.

need a little bit of steering.

Yeah. Before we go, this has been really great. Before we go, I really have to ask you about commission breath. I have to know, when you say commission breath, you say, ⁓ it’s so obvious. Like, is it? what do you, if someone was trying to, you know, trying to get some commission from selling to you, what would be like the signs that you would see if someone’s going to?

John Lee (25:40)
Yeah.

it’s just I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s just you just get a feeling that they’re like in the back of their mind. They’re like buy it, it, it, buy it, buy it, buy it, buy it. And you know, there’s the certain signs of like they over follow up following up great, but they bug you. And then maybe if you say like, we’re going to think about it, they get a little short with you.

or if you’re out of showing and they say you say like, we’re looking at a few more homes or like, well, you don’t want to make an offer on this one. It’s you can just tell that like maybe this is the only deal that they’ve got going on or you can tell when they’re new ⁓ or this is the only listing that they’ve got and they don’t know when anything else is coming and they’ve got their rent due or their car payments due or something like that or they haven’t had a closing in three or four months. ⁓ I would say the

At least for me, because I kind of casually walk through things, I’m I try to be laid back and I’m not going to get overly excited about anything that I’m going to do. It’s when they get a little bit short or they try to push the timeline. So I’ll say, you know, I’ll call you back in a couple of days and you know, let me discuss it and we’ll call you back. And if I got any questions, you know, we’ll let you know and they’ll call me the next day or they’ll say, you know what? What can we do to speed this up? You know what can I do? ⁓ And they turn it into.

You know, they’re trying to give it away or, you know, we’ll do this or we’ll do that or whatever we can do to make it happen. You know, they just seem a little.

Cody Crabb (27:16)
all this. Yeah, they have something in common, which is they’re not taking you into consideration. Everything that they’re talking about is basically what about. So I think that’s probably what it is, is that everything you mentioned is like, that’s what it goes back to.

John Lee (27:26)
All done.

And if you work with an experienced agent or an agent that is set and they know where their next deals are coming from and they’re established and they’re making a living on it, just being relaxed around you, you can tell. Because yes, they would love you to buy the home or whatever they’re working with you on. But you can almost tell like they don’t care if you don’t.

because they know they’ve got other business, which is good because then they’re not pressuring you into a right or wrong deal.

Cody Crabb (28:02)
Yeah, very true, very true. Well, all this has been really, really great. If people want to find out more about your coaching, about what you do, how can they do that? How can they find you online?

John Lee (28:12)
Our website is theclosingclass.com. Facebook and Instagram are the same. And you can email us, it’s [email protected] And that is Alex and I personally. have nobody that works for us. We handle everything. So if you get a reply, it’s Alex or I or both of us. ⁓ So we are the coaches. We are the people that are in the weeds. And we want to work with anybody that we can. We just are open to conversations.

Cody Crabb (28:40)
Awesome. Yeah. And I think there’s something to be said for, you know, a coach that is actually still doing the thing that they say that they’re trying to help you do. Like there’s something to be said for like make a million dollars a month doing real estate. And I’m like, why are you charging for coaching then if you’re making a million dollars a month during real? Yeah. So that’s something to be said for you still doing the investing part.

John Lee (29:01)
I mean, I make a living in other ways. So, you know, I’m not, I don’t have coaching breath, I hope. good plug, but we, you know, we just, we want to help. And it’s, it’s more of a passion of ours than I originally thought it would be. And it’s turned into kind of a personal passion and project PPP. And we’re just, we just want to do what we can to help people and make sure that especially people our age that

Cody Crabb (29:08)
Yeah, I like it.

John Lee (29:30)
Maybe it’s their first house or they’re upsizing with a family and they don’t know what to do and they’ve got two careers and two or three kids. Maybe they’re working with a friend agent that’s new, but we can help them. Or an investor that wants to leave something for their kids or change their lifestyle a little bit. Just have a conversation. And we offer, we have a free hour call with anybody that wants just to kind of audit where they are in life and see if they’re a good fit. We’re not gonna take everybody.

We don’t want a phone call a day and take clients a day because we can’t do that. So it’s a selective group of people that are serious and will take our serious and will go through the whole program and will work with us and that we want to work.

Cody Crabb (30:13)
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for all this. This has been really helpful. And thank you audience for joining us. If you got something from this episode, and I know you did, go ahead and give us a like, subscribe, comment, all the things, and don’t forget to follow us so that you don’t miss more awesome conversations with people like John. John, it has been a true pleasure. You are lovely to talk to. I really appreciate it. And thanks for all the insights you’ve shared today. You have a good one.

John Lee (30:35)
Thank you, I appreciate it, you too.