SOTM 58 (Part 2): Scaling a Real Estate Business – Tips with David Greene

Aaron Amuchastegul: Real Estate Rockstars, this is Aaron Amuchastegui. Hey, welcome back to the second part of the state of the market episode interview that I did with David Greene. All of you guys know, David Greene is one of the hosts of the BiggerPockets podcast focused on real estate investors. I have him here talking. This is just the second half. We talked so much last week when we did this recording. I wanted to split it into two different data markets for you.

We’re about to jump into our next quick interview. We have a quick question. We’re taking some questions from people that reach out to us on Instagram, and Facebook, and things like that. I’m just going to jump into my next question from a listener on how to scale a business. Listen up.

Aaron: I had another one that I thought was too good to not ask you. This is a guy reaching out from Metro, Detroit. He said, “Hey, love your show on BP. I’m a full-time law enforcement officer. I’ve got 40 single-family homes. They’re all in the foreclosure space.” He’s trying to figure out how to scale up. He’s talking about what are some different advice and I said, “Hey, that sounds a lot like my buddy David Greene’s story. When I met David, he had about 25 or 40 houses, and he’s a full-time law investment.” He said, “Yes, brilliant fella. Mad love for him.” I’m going to talk to him some more about some ways that he might be able to scale his business.

At different levels of your business, as you’ve scaled and do it now, you’re still doing some stuff out of state, but you’re also doing these huge flips in the Bay Area, and kind of doing everything. What’s your first steps as you scaled to do more? Was it doing more per month? Was it doing more expensive houses? So much of your story is you did the BRRR. You’d buy it, you’d refinance it, you’d have the money and you would just go do it again. Was there something that created momentum for you at different times like that?

David: Momentum in which way?

Aaron: Well, to where it started– It’s sometimes in scale. Some people would say, “Hey, the scale is I’m going to be one house a month for the next year or I’m going to do one house this month, one house next month, two houses the next month, where they start– Did you get to where you start doing more per month or more expensive? Or did you stay steady and it all added up?

David: Yes, that’s a very good point. At the time, when I was working in law enforcement, it was very steady, and consistent, and predictable, and somewhat boring, which is still probably a great motto. I’d recommend almost everybody should be aspiring to that. Regardless of how big plans you have, that model will work for you. Building well should be boring, it should be somewhat predictable. Real estate is a get-rich, slow game. That was why I really liked it.

It was when I started selling houses as a real estate agent and transitioned out of being a police officer investor kind of agent into a full-time agent that was also investing that I hit– It was like I hit the nos on the car. It started going so fast that I had to let go of some of the other things that I was doing. There’s a lot of people that have said, “Well, why are you not buying rentals right now? Why are you not focusing as much on that?” There’s a lot of reasons why that would be the case. The ultimate answer is, I’m not going to stop doing that. I just paused it for a minute so I can go learn these other things, and build these other skills.

What I found from doing that was that I got really good at building systems, I got really good at being more organized, I learned to put a team around me, I learned to be focused more on the vision of what I’m trying to do than just in the trenches, putting a nail into a piece of wood, which is very hard to break out of that when that’s what you’re used to. Then when I take all this knowledge and I transition it back into the real estate stuff, it will be 5 to 10 houses for every one that I used to buy, but it will feel like the same amount of work.

For him, as far as what he’s doing, he can continue going that route of 40 homes in the foreclosure process and he should. What he’ll find is they’ll hit a point of diminishing returns where getting another single-family rental will not feel like– it won’t get you excited anymore because you’ll recognize, “I just bought myself another problem that I have to work on every single month. It’s another set of emails I got to answer, and spreadsheets I got to look at, and repair requests I have to go through.”

If you want to continue that road, you have to learn leverage. You have to get– I have someone else now who manages my single-family portfolio. I have every single property manager in all the different four or five states where I own property. I have two property managers in each location. They all funnel to the same email that’s only used for that. That person checks that email, and deals with the problems that come in, they go through all of the statements that come in, they show how much rent was collected for every property, how much we paid, I get a total, that gets put on a different spreadsheet that I can quickly look at once a month, and I can see where we are.

If there’s problems that he doesn’t know how to solve, he comes to me and we go through it. Once you’ve got that in place, you can scale that thing infinitely. At a certain point, you have 400 of those properties. One person can’t manage them all. You have three or four people doing that job. That first person you hired, they manage those three or four people. If you use that pyramid model, not a pyramid scheme, but the person who learns how to do the job now has to transition into a leadership role where they train and supervise other people who are now doing that job. You can keep scaling.

The point I want to make and this is a long-winded way of making it is that you can’t stay focused on putting the hammer into the wood or the nail into the wood if that’s what you want to do. You have to grow as a person. You have to learn how to be a leader, you have to learn how to create systems, you have to learn how to create structure because you’re going to need to bring other people into this fold. The beautiful thing once you’ve done that is that model of buying single-family foreclosures and having someone else manage them becomes relatively self-sustaining. Now he can take all the skills he learned there and go apply it into bigger deals, or different things.

That’s how I’m now moving into the broker business to do loans. I’ve got a team of people that are doing most of the work for my clients, I can now go work on becoming a lender and building a lending team, very similar to what I did with the real estate stuff. That’s what everyone who’s listening and that has big plans you have to accept, you will no longer just be doing the skill work required to succeed in the little area that you’re used to doing. In order to grow, you have to develop the new skills.

I think, Aaron, you’re a great person to learn from because you’re one of the first people I heard talk about this that really got me thinking, “Can you really just have everything go to an email and not read it and not have your whole world fall apart?” And everybody respects you. I’ve never met a human being that doesn’t respect the way you do things and what you’ve done, and you’re somebody who did it. Maybe I should ask you what are some of the growing pains that you went through as you had to learn how to systemize so you could have your hands on so many things.

Aaron: That’s it’s so funny. It’s a great reminder of how email funneling and stuff like that can become an ultimate hack for scale. If people are first, trying to scale, your example was realizing– Focus is so much of what messes us up in our daily lives. We look at– we open our email, there’s 60 emails and the whole what I used to get on stage four was saying like, “Hey, you show up at work with one thing to do and eight hours later, you didn’t get any of it done,” because as soon as you got there, you started– and we’d go in for weeks at a time going, “Well, today, I’m going to write that contract. I’m going to write the contact.” And a week goes by.

One of the big tricks is not looking at our email or what Tim Ferris would talk a lot about. It’s like time-blocking and being able to time block for each part of your business. The very simple hack that I think people are starting to use. We have an email address for our utilities. It’s just like, hey, there’s one email address that’s called utilities at our company name.

Anytime we’re turning utilities off and on, our utility bills, everything goes to there because one of the toughest things when you first start scaling, whether it’s construction, whether it’s rentals, whether it’s flipping, or whether you’re an agent that’s doing REOs of some of that, utilities becomes a big part of it because there’s nothing that’ll take off somebody more if they show up for an inspection and the power or water isn’t on. That’s like a very simple avoidable thing, yet it happens all the time. Agents show up and one of the utilities got turned off. “I sent an email yesterday to ask and they said, “Yes.”” A utility email for that.

You’re using one email for your property manager stuff, which gives you the ability to a couple of things. One, you can easily hire somebody to go do that part of your business, and you could easily replace them and switch people in and out, or if you wanted to do your own management, but you wanted to make sure you only spent a couple hours a week on it, just on Fridays at 10:00 AM, you would open up that email and get to track it. I really like the idea of I think what a lot of people need to think about when they want to scale.

Whether you’re a real estate agent saying you want to do more deals. They want to do more deals. They want to start a mortgage broker. They want to do these different things. I encourage people to try to figure out what their why is. Really just asking like, “What’s the goal? What’s the five-year goal? What’s the three-year goal? What’s the one-year goal and why?” “So I can spend more time with my family.”

A lot of my things that I used to say is, I remember going, “Man, I want to be rich someday. I want to be rich some day.” Why? What would you do? Tell people or ask people, “Well, what would you do if you’re rich? What would you do if you had all the money in the world?” They’d be like, “Well, I’m going to golf every day, I’m going to do this, or I’m going to go travel like this,” and it’s about trying to encourage them to go, “Okay, we need to set up a business like that.”

I made a post this last week. I was at a campsite in South Dakota on auction day and I had my computer out on the picnic table and my son’s next to me eating a doughnut and I’m bidding at auction. It was like, “Hey, this looks awesome, right?” I just bought two houses in Texas from my computer, from a picnic table in South Dakota, but it’s because of these teams that I have, but it’s remembering that those teams took many years to build, and it was because a few years ago when I first started doing that, I said, “Hey, I want to be able to do this. I don’t want to have to stand at auction and bid.”

What does that mean? Who are the people that I need on my teams? Those people visualize the five-year. “Hey, I want to either be retired,” or “I still want to be involved, but I only want to have to do this, or this, or I only want to have to work one or two hours a day.” You start piecing together what your team should be and then you start gradually adding them on.

There’s some people on the team that are easier to replace and simpler, and other people that the longer they stay the better. I liked the idea in an ideal world, you could have stuff so simple that you have eight different team members, and all of them only focused on one little thing because then if they decide they want to do something else, it’s easy to train somebody. It’s really tough to replace somebody that’s an all-knowing assistant. If you have an assistant that runs your accounting, and runs your scheduling, and runs all of your teams, and then something goes wrong, it’s really, really hard to come back from it.

I’ve experienced that. I’ve got a couple of people that were my right-hand people that were doing everything that when something went wrong and I had to start over, it was really a setback. The tough part with segmenting like that though is maybe each person only has a 5 or 10 hour a week job before you get big. When you’re small, it’s much easier to hire a person that can do several things or a few people, but coming up with systems along the way and visualizing it. Then one of the big tricks that I’ve used lately too, is just like screencast software.

Every time I’m doing something that’s simple and repetitive, turning insurance off and on, turning utilities off and on, grabbing a spreadsheet from here and uploading it to there, I would get myself in a mindset that said, “Hey, anytime I’m doing something that I shouldn’t have to do, I’m just going to do a screen recording, I’m going to save it, I’m going to file it as how to start insurance on a property, and just talk while I do it with the goal of I hope that’s the last time I’ll have to do it,” because now I’m going to send that to this person, and next time they’re going to do it.

Scaling businesses is fun as long as you know why, as long as you really have– there was times I wanted to go really, really big businesses. I wanted to have lots of employees, I wanted to have a like a Google, Facebook type office, but if that was my only why, it wasn’t able to sustain itself because to do that, you also have to have a really profitable business that can handle heavy overhead. You got to figure out what your why is as you grow.

David: I feel like the business of being a real estate agent is one of the simplest and easiest businesses to scale. Now, I don’t mean it’s easy to be successful at doing it. What I mean is it’s one of the easiest businesses to systemize and it’s like with training wheels. It takes a minute if you’re going to try to systemize this before we’re going to go really fast, but for the most part, our commissions are big enough that there is plenty that could be chucked out of that and paid to somebody else to scale a business slowly and systematically.

What I’m basically doing right now is I’m preparing for 2021, or I set a really big goal. I said, “Okay, I want to sell $150 million worth of real estate in 2021.” That’s going to be somewhere between 200 and 250 houses and I don’t want to do it with 20 agents. I want to do it with four. Three, or four. Mainly two of us. That’s just simply because more people is more problems. Notorious BIG, he never got to make that song. If he’d have been alive long enough, that’s what it would have been. It’s really hard-

Aaron: and that’s for sure.

David: -when you get a lot of people and all of their own personal quirks and emotions involved. What I was thinking is, as you were talking, it became so simple. Every single business is some form of taking a crude natural resource and converting it into a usable product. Whether you’re talking about how Nike makes shoes or Chevron gets gasoline, it starts off as leather and cotton, and it slowly goes through a whole bunch of steps to become a tennis shoe that people like and want to buy or don’t.

Gasoline is an easy example to use. It’s a bunch of crude oil in the ground. Somebody has to figure out a way to get it out. Once they got it out, they got to figure out a place to store it. Somebody has to move it to the place it’s going to be stored. Once it’s stored, somebody has to figure out a way to turn it into something else that will be turned into something else that will ultimately be what we call gasoline or diesel.

Then that has to be transported to someone. Then that person has to sell it. When we say what’s your job, what you’re really replying with is, I play this role in this huge process, this huge system, to take something that is crude and turn it into something that’s refined, if that makes sense. I would challenge just about anybody, there’s no business that doesn’t do that in some degree.

In the real estate agent business, our job is to take a human being who has some desire to either own a house or sell a house, but every time they want to sell it, it’s usually because they want to buy a different one. There’s not many people that you’re selling a home for that don’t want to go buy a different house or somewhere else, unless it’s a probate sale from someone that passed away.

Your job is to create the system of turning this desire that somewhere inside somebody into a, “Here’s your keys of the new house and the commission that you get for it.” Most agents don’t really know what they’re doing to get from A to D. They just take it as it comes, they try to figure it out as they go. A lot of the time, they’re leaning on the client to figure out what’s going to happen. The client’s got to call them, the client has to say what they want, then the agent runs and says, “Okay, yes, I’ll go do it.”

They’re much more like a waiter taking an order than they are like a business owner who is walking somebody through a process and being purposeful. That’s been my number one frustration with the people that are working with me is they have that waiter mentality, the order taker. They say they’re giving great customer service, but really what that means is, “I don’t really know what I’m doing and I’m not in charge of this transaction.” That’s why clients feel so much strain, and stress, and anxiety because they’re having to run the show.

What I’ve been doing to prepare for 2021 is literally coming up with a step-by-step process that every single one of our clients is going to go through to get from A to Z. The lead comes in. The first thing we do is enter their name in the CRM. The next thing we do is put it into the spreadsheet so that we don’t forget about contacting them. The next thing we do is reach out. When they reply, this would be the next step.

Now, some of these people are going to skip the first seven steps. The minute that they email me, they’re going to say, “Hey, I want to buy a house, I’m already pre-approved, can you take me to see homes?” They’ve already done the first nine steps for me, but those steps still had to get done. What I’m doing is creating that system of here is every step from this point to this point, and then that becomes someone’s job. You are my inside sales agent, you grab all these new leads, you contact them, you ask them these questions, you set me up for the part where I jump in, and I have this phone call with them to go over the overall plan.

When I’m done with that phone call, I will put them through this part of the process. They’re going to introduce them to a buyer’s agent, that buyer’s agent is going to get on speed with what they’re doing, they’re going to schedule a presentation where they’re going to go over what we do. Here’s the four things they have to do to get ready for that presentation. That person handles those steps in the entire system.

It’s just like an oil company who says, “Okay, your job is to get it out of the ground. Your job is to transport it. Your job is to hold it. Your job is to turn it into something different.” If we can get agents to start thinking that way you are now on the way to building out a team, to building a business. Even if you never hire people, you’re on the path to not letting your client run the show. They don’t have to figure it out for themselves.

You have a path that you are taking them on and you’ll be much more organized and you’ll feel less stressed. That’s really the mindset shift that occurred with me when I realized this is how I can run all these different things. I have a bunch of checklists that I use when I buy a rental. I have a bunch of checklists for a flip. I have a bunch of checklists for an agent. I have a bunch of checks lists for a lending partner.

Then you look at the podcast that I’m doing or the books that I’m writing. It’s the same thing. It’s a process that I’ve spelled out. The more that you do it, the faster you get and the better you get at doing it. I would bet, Aaron, if we looked at all the different things you’re involved in, you’re not just winging it. You’re not just like, “Oh, this person comes here. Let’s give this a shot.”

Aaron: Having that list. That’s actually something right now that a lot of– Our agents are in two extremes right now. Half of our listeners are doing so many deals right now, they’ve never been this busy. The other half of our listeners are not. The other half of our listeners are really struggling because inventory’s down and there’s seven offers on a property and they’re the fifth, they’re the second-best offer a bunch of times.

It’s a time when people are trying to work hard, but it’s also a lot more times where it’s a little slower. For the agents right now, where it’s a little slower, where you’re not as busy because you have fewer clients, it’s a great time to spell out what that process that David just said. For you and your clients what is the perfect A to Z experience that makes it better. Take it to where you’re sitting there just kind of, I like to drink a cup of coffee and have nothing else on the table and just start writing. You can use experience of, so first step is I meet them and then there’s an arrow. It’s like when I buy a house, first step is we turn on insurance.

Next step is we turn on utilities. Next step is we go to the house and we inspect it. If it’s occupied, we leave this notice. If it’s vacant, we change the locks. You just start drawing and sketching it out. Then you kind of remember after you do your first thing, because the first visual through, you’ll do most of it in your memory but with an agent with an experience, first I emailed them these houses or I do a questionnaire with them so I know what’s on there.

I set them up with the automatic stuff this way. I make sure I check in with them once a week. There’s all sorts of software that does that stuff too. It’s in its purest form at the beginning if you’re trying to say like, what is perfect. Then you can think back to the deals that you lost, the people that you lost. Oh, I lost them because I didn’t follow up enough here.

David: Now let me add a step right here to make sure I don’t do it. What I was thinking when you were talking about the agents who are having a hard time, like they’re getting outbid. They were super close. They did 98% of the work, but their client wouldn’t come up another $10,000.

What if you added a step earlier in the process where you explain to them there’s scenarios that are going to come up that look like this, let’s talk right now about how we’re going to handle it so you’re not in the middle of the chaos trying to make the right decision. It’s literally a step in your system that you make that would have made you the extra 2% successful that would have been the difference between a paycheck and not.

Aaron: Yes. So many people are getting second place right now. Obviously, if there’s seven offers on a house, six people thought they were going to buy the house and didn’t. They found the house of the people like, “I want to live in this one.” and six of them lost. That’s a really unique time. Right now, while we’re not as busy, take that time, come up with your steps. Add that step in now where you’re going to be talking to that buyer ahead of time.

David: Show you here. This is an example of what a roadmap can look like. That little first branch there for people that are watching this on the video is an example of all the steps we take when a lead first comes in and it moves itself up to where it the branches into two different branches here of like a Y. One of those is for buyers and one of those is for borrowers. Along there, I just wrote every step that this person does, then I carved into, “Okay, this is this person’s job. This is this person’s job.” Like you said, Aaron, and every time something goes wrong, I can go back and I add a step and I say, “Okay, here’s what we do.”

Now the people that come work for me, I can give them very clear directions, “Here’s where you have to get better. It’s not just doing this, it’s doing this well.” What does it look like to prepare your client for the fact it’s going to go over asking price and how are we going to determine that? What does it look like to get better at this skill? There’s not a lot of that that goes on in our industry. It’s why a lot of people complain about agents.

The last point I’ll make is your point about the screencast can literally be each of those little steps that I had detailed has a little link that they click on and they watch a screencast of how to do it. That’s how as simple it can be. Like you said, it starts with the list. You make the screencast and you put a little link right there in your list. Then when you hire someone, you’re hiring a person to do these eight steps. There’s a video that shows them how to do each one.

Aaron: Yes. As people really start to scale, it’s like being able to do it now as we’re less busy. You could take an extra couple minutes right now as you’re turning something on or doing it. Just like what David just showed us, that branch, and then having that step on there. One of the toughest part about hiring somebody is they show up on the first day and they only have like an hour worth of work.

I’ve had a lot of times where people are like, “No, I need an assistant. I need an assistant.” Then they hire one and on the first day like, “I don’t have anything for them to do. I’m not ready to train them yet. I don’t have enough stuff or I have an hour worth of stuff.” They’re like, “Oh wait, maybe I was a little bit overwhelmed, but maybe I didn’t need a full-time hire.” This’ll help you figure out.

You can also take it a step further and look at what step you need to be filling, what type of person needs to be filling each of those branches as we go through it. I loved the idea too, of having the conversations out there right now with your clients. As an agent, having a conversation with your client to say, “Hey, let’s talk about the three or four things that are happening in this market right now.” Some sellers aren’t doing any repairs because they got seven offers and they’re thinking, “Hey, I don’t to do this repair for you. I’m going to go”. so what are we going to do? Or there’s this on price.

Coming up with strategy when it’s not as emotional, when it’s not as in the heat of the moment at the very beginning, when you’re sitting down with them, they’re talking about their dream home and you can say, “This is what the market’s like right now. Now I’m the expert. I’m going to work really hard for you but these are all the different things that I’ve seen. Let’s come up with strategy ahead of time. Are you okay with being second place on it?” If there are seven offers, do you want me to make sure we’re the best one? How do you want me to handle this?” Then as agents too, it’ll help us figure out how to manage our time.

David: You have to learn how to do that in a hot market. So many agents are people pleasers that they avoid that difficult conversation when you first get with the client, thinking that by being the waiter and saying, “Oh, you’d like a Coke, let me go get you a Coke. Oh, you changed your mind, you want a Sprite? Okay, I’ll go get you a Sprite.” Ultimately that does make your client feel good in the beginning, but it doesn’t serve them when they get out there into the bidding war they’re going into and the seller says, “I don’t care if you drink anything. That person’s willing to do it for nothing. I’m going to go with them.”

You have to be able to tell your client, “This is what you’re getting into,” when they’re not in the war. They’re in their barracks and it’s safe. You’re like, “Okay, is this what you want to do? Let me tell you what it’s going to feel like.” It’s not uncommon in my market. I would say the average listing that we’re going after gets between 7 to 10 offers. Getting it at asking price is not even worth talking about, it won’t happen when there’s 7 to 10 people.

I tell the buyers, “We’re not competing with the seller, we’re competing with the other eight people that want that house. If you don’t want to do that, you have to take my advice and look for houses that have been on the market for 20 days or more.” In that situation, I can use my negotiation skills to get you a much better deal. That means you have to be disciplined enough to not chase the same four houses that everybody else is chasing. It won’t be as pretty. It will have some issues with it. There’s gonna be wallpaper or ugly carpet. It’s not going to show as well.

If you don’t want to take that road, you are willingly choosing to step into a situation where you may have to pay $100,000 to $150,000 over the list price, which means if you’re approved at 900, we have to start looking at 750 houses, not 900 houses. If you let the client make the decision on their own before they start, it’s so much better than if you go out there and you get outbid and you say, “Oh, what can we do? The market’s really hot. I don’t know. There’s nothing I could do. We just got outbid.” But you didn’t prepare your client for what they were getting into. That’s really the skill of being an agent in a hot market that you have to develop.

You have to be able to have those difficult conversations. You have to have a system in place where you’re preparing the client. What I’ll do is I’ll sit down with a new buyer. Let’s say they give some resistance and they go, “There’s no way I’m paying 150K over. David, you’re just saying that because you want to make your job easier. I will show them the area they’re looking in on the comps that have sold. I will show the list price to sale price. “Do you see this house? It sold in eight days. It was listed at 900, it sold at 1.1. This one sold in 10 days. It was listed at 800. It sold at 900. Don’t tell me that this isn’t the way it goes. This is every house.

Now, do you see this one? This was on the market 30 days. It was listed at 1,000,000 and it sold for 970. Which of these two people do you want to be?” If you go over it with them when you first meet and they don’t feel like you’re being a pushy sales person, you didn’t wait until the middle of the, “Okay, you got to come up $80,000 more than you thought.” They’re going to have all these doubts like, “Do I really have to go up $80,000?”

Even if you get the deal, you may lose the client because they feel you weren’t looking out for them. If you show it to them in the beginning, it’s completely different. You and I were talking before this thing started, the ability to have direct conversations that are very honest and negotiate those waters without putting yourself in conflict with the other side is a huge asset to have.

There’s a few things you said there that were super brilliant, and really saying, “Hey, there are two different options in this market right now.” It is the, you go after the properties that just got listed, and there’s a good chance that it’s going to go over asking and showing them the examples because it’s going to be different in every market. $100, 000 market in Texas then maybe everything’s going $10,000 over asking, but whatever it is, people have their price. Usually, if somebody says, “I’m approved for a house for $500,000.” Their search is going even to $525,000.

David: That’s exactly right.

Aaron: They’re actually going to list more because they would say, “Hey, maybe we can talk them down.” And you’re going to say, “Yes.” If you see it that $525,000, it’s been on the market for six months, maybe, but really you’re going to have to be looking at houses for $450,000 so you can make the offer for $500,000. It’s really good at the beginning to say, “Which route do you want to go?” Because the strategy part that you said, that I haven’t even heard anybody say it like that is right now in a market, you’re not competing with the seller. It’s not you negotiating against the seller. You’re competing with the other buyers, the seller’s just taking the best offer.

When someone sends me seven offers, I’m just taking the best one and if I counter back and I say, “I’m not going to do any repairs because I have seven offers.” That’s not me being a jerk. It’s me just saying like, “There’s seven of them and one of them is going to say this.” Being able to change that mindset for the buyers to say like, “We’re not battling with the seller here, we’re battling with everybody else. We want to beat them.”

David: If you don’t do that, they’re going to blame you. They’re going to say, “You didn’t negotiate for me. You got beat by the seller.” They’re not going to understand if you took a hard stance, they would kick you out of contract and they’d go with another one. You can’t have that conversation in the middle of it because they’re going to doubt and question your integrity.

Aaron: They’ll say, “We made a full-price offer and the seller rejected our offer. Why did they reject the offer?” I’d had that happened this last week. They reached out to me like, “Why did you reject our offer?” I was like, “Because I’ve had seven offers and they’re all over.” I didn’t feel comfortable countering back over asking either. I didn’t want to go back to somebody and say, “You need to go $ 20,000 over asking in a counter.” It was just like, “No, I just had to do that.”

That’s two different perspectives. In a buyers market, you are competing against the seller and it’s you’re negotiating against the seller and when the request for repairs comes out, you’re negotiating as the seller and in a hot market where it’s a sellers market, you aren’t competing against the seller, you’re competing against the other buyers and everything you do takes that seller back to say, “Hey, do I put it back on the market, I go find a better buyer?” Instead for that really unique perspective. What was the first assistant you ever hired? The first person you added to the team.

David: That’s a good one. Before I answer that I’ll throw this last piece in. I use that same strategy with sellers also. When I go take your listing and I know that it’s going to sell somewhere around $700,000 but you think it’s going to sell for $800,000, I don’t tell you you’re wrong and I’m smarter than you and get into a fight. I show you the competition. Here’s the other houses that buyers are looking at. They’ve got six other homes that are the same as yours that are all priced between $685000 and $710,000.

We’re not putting your house on the market and having a buyer go look at just your house and make their decision, they’re going to look at every single house that’s in this price range. If you were a buyer and you toured these five homes, including yours, why would you pay $100,000 more for yours? Is those solar panels that you have really worth $100,000 to a buyer?

I could get them thinking in the same terms of, “We’re not negotiating with a buyer. We’re negotiating against the five other listings that are all on the market right now that are $100,000 less than us. I’m not the bad guy, these houses are out there.” Just, in general, those are the skills I think agents have to develop, especially in a hot market, when it’s hard to get homes under contract, you have to be better at what you do.

Aaron: Absolutely, like sellers, they get locked. People get locked into a value for a house and they say, “No, it’s worth that. I know it because I did this and this and because this was the upgrade, and being able to say, “Hey, you might be right. Your house is amazing and I can totally see why you would pay 800 for it, but you’re not competing against me, and we’re not even competing against the buyer. It’s not us as a seller. You’re not negotiating against the buyer, you are competing against the other sellers.”

David: The other sellers.

Aaron: That’s a total mindset shift, I think for a lot of real estate agents, as they hear that and they get to treat that as a little bit different philosophy, taking that to your clients is going to help your clients just trust you and not blame something that goes wrong on you, and they get to blame it on the other ones. My question was, as we jump around– [crosstalk]

David: First hire?

Aaron: Yes, your first hire.

David: Her name was Krista. When you hire your first person, the more of this, what I call the roadmap, all the different steps that have to be taken. I have a whole nother branch for sellers that’s different than buyers. Here’s all the steps that we take and I have assistants that do the majority of the work with the seller. I basically get a seller lead, have an assistant run all my due diligence.

They’re going to basically run my CMA, call all the pendings, call the actives, get notes about every single property and what the agent says, prepare me for my listing presentation. Go on the client’s Facebook, look, and see what kind of stuff they’re into. I want to know what their political beliefs are so I don’t accidentally step into something that would offend them. I want to know what sports teams they like. I want to know where they grew up. When you go there, I’m trying to develop rapport.

They’re prepping me by doing all this research. Then they set the appointment. I show up to go take the listing. I come back with a signed listing agreement. My admin jump in and they do all the work of getting the house ready for the market. They schedule everything, they make sure all the forms are filled out. They get the information that I want for the description, they write it out and then I tweak it. Then we go on the market and I have them fielding all the questions from buyer’s agents that are asked and collecting all the offers and putting them in a spreadsheet for me to quickly look at it.

It’s very similar to what we said earlier, where I was saying, you take this crude resource and you turn it into something refined. What reminded me of that was you saying that you were on the beach and you were buying a deal or you were at the pool. You can make that decision when all the information has been refined and put into the perfect way for you to look at it, analyze it, make your decision. It just took a lot of work that other people had to do to get that information in front of you and the way that you needed.

That’s where admin completely blow up your business in a good way. They do 98% of the stuff that takes your time, but that 2% you’re doing is the part that actually affects the client. I’m negotiating that deal to put it into contract, I’m going on the listing presentation to answer all their questions, make them feel comfortable, and trust us with the process. I didn’t have to prep myself for that appointment. Someone else can do it. I didn’t have to do all the work of getting the property ready to be put on the market if it’s systemized.

I didn’t have the systems in place. When I hired Krista, it was literally, “David, what do you want me to do?” And I’m like, “What do you mean what I want you to do? Do all the stuff we have to do.” “Well, I don’t know what that is.” Oh, my God. I am woefully unprepared for this. I had to start writing out what these steps were so that Krista knew what she was going to be doing all day. Then, the process of her and I going through it so she got good at doing it.

Then the point I wanted to make about your first assistant, they’re going to be a Jack of all trades. They’re not

going to be a specialist. If I had hired a bookkeeper as my first assistant, I would have never got anywhere because I have had amazing books but my clients wouldn’t have been able to talk to this person. They would have been way too slow getting things done because bookkeepers are very thorough but they’re not super productive as far as their speed. They’re usually not going to be a people person.

The business would have suffered if I had hired a specialist in one thing. I needed someone that could do a little of everything competently and quickly. Kristen was more than competent but that’s why she worked, is she worked so fast and she was so purposeful with what she did that, even though she wasn’t amazing at any one aspect of it, she did half of everything that had to get done. She handled the support and the admin, I handled the sales.

My second hire, I took what Krista did and I cut off half of it and gave that to that person. Now they can handle twice as much support and I can do twice as much sales. My next hire was actually on the sales side. That was someone that was coming to work with my buyers. They weren’t a full buyer’s agent because they weren’t ready to take my leads and run with them but they handle the showing of houses, looking at properties on the MLS.

All the stuff that took a lot of time that didn’t actually save the clients money is what I had them do. As I’ve hired more people, it’s forced me to get more specific with every step in the system, and that’s where I feel like if agents want to scale, you got two options. You build that whole world or you work for somebody that has that world. Now, you don’t have to do either of those two things but you’re probably not going to scale.

You’re going to stay doing the number of deals you’re doing right now. That’s not a bad thing by the way, if you’re happy doing 20 deals a year, 30 deals a year, keep doing it, but for people that are listening to podcasts like this, they usually want more. “How do I get to that million dollar GCI or $3 million a year? How do I build this thing out to be really big?” You got to have people helping you and in order to have people helping you, you have to make it very clear what you want them doing.

Aaron: Yes. You and I have talked before about people knowing their strengths and we even talked a little bit about it today. A fun example of this a guy that was on here earlier in the week, where he really likes the admin stuff and he didn’t like the people person stuff as much. He was an agent for a year or two before he started his own brokerage and now he has a giant brokerage, and it has a giant mortgage company and a giant escrow and title company with it.

He realized what his strength was and what he really liked. He was able to be in real estate even though he didn’t necessarily like doing the negotiations. I thought that was really cool, he did it for a couple of years. He’s like, “No, I learned it and I did fine but what I really wanted was to build a business.” He’s like, “So now I’m the broker but I don’t actually do any deals myself.” I thought it was really great to get that reminder that you could be good at anything and then follow through it.

One of the last times we took a question that came in, somebody was saying they’re struggling knocking on doors, they don’t know how to do it, and your recommendation at that time was, “Find what you’re good at and do it.” I want to remind people right now, as things are funny with COVID type stuff, find something that you’re good at and see if you might be able to spin something else that’s happening out there. Another guy that I interviewed this week, he does door knocking but he hates talking to people in person.

It’s the most intimidating thing ever. He just decided, “You know what I’ll do. I’ll just put flyers at every door.” He aggressively left flyers everywhere. He would leave them on every porch, he’d canvased his whole neighborhoods and he would do it every week in the same neighborhood. It took him months before people started calling and then people started calling. That was a good example of saying, “Hey, one of the real estate techniques out there was knocking on a door and saying, ‘Sell me your house.'”

That was so terrifying, and he’s like, “No, my personality isn’t like that,” but he took the method and said, “Here’s my version of it. I’ll knock on the door and leave a flyer and run before they come open the door. Then if they decide to call me later, that’s great,” and it worked for him. What are some techniques out there that you guys are doing? I know so much of your stuff comes from word of mouth and referrals, but what are you doing to try to generate more stuff right now? As you hire new agents and bring them onto the team, what are you having them do to generate stuff?

David: Well, my vision is similar to the broker guys. I want to look for the agents that love talking to people, very charismatic, very popular, kind of your standard traditional top producer. They’re the ones that know everyone in town but they’re unorganized and maybe not the most knowledgeable. They’re never going to want to understand the nuts and bolts of anything. They just like to make people happy.

I want to bring them in and put them on this system that I’ve created to where they can excel without having to be organized, without having to have this knowledge or know all the details of a contract or a transaction. Those are the people I want to be working for me. What I have learned to do is to take the agents that come and try to figure out what is their strength? Where are they good? Do they have a large sphere of people that look up to them? Are they really good at open houses? Are they really smart but they’re shy?

There’s still a world for that person to succeed in in my company. They’re probably not going to work with their own leads though. There’s agents that know a ton about real estate, they are brilliant, but they’re not people person so they do 10 deals a year because they just don’t want to go out there and set the world on fire, talking to people. I get them working more with my clients. I say, “Okay, this is my lead. You’re going to get this percentage of the commission. This is what you’re going to do,” and they love it.

They don’t have to go experience rejection, they don’t have to go post on social media a ton. They don’t have to go put themselves in uncomfortable positions but they still get to do a great job serving that client. They’re amazing when it comes to running numbers and looking at comps and estimating rehabs and finding the amazing deal on the MLS that everybody else missed. They’re super thorough with that.

What I found is if you leave that person out there on their own, they’re going to suffer. They’re going to be really smart but they’re not going to make any money. There’s the other side of it, where you get the person that is super good, that gets 30 leads a month, and they close four of them because they’re so unorganized. That’s the agent that people complain about. “They don’t call me back,” “They misspelled everything,” “I had to do so much of the transaction, but oh, she’s so nice,” or, “Oh, he’s just so much fun that’s why people like him.”

I think that the future of real estate is finding a world where someone else is taking care of the aspect you’re not good at and having the self-awareness to know you’re not good here. Like that person you just mentioned that went and started a brokerage because they knew, “I don’t like talking to people all the time.” That’s very similar to me. That’s Gary Keller too, it’s the same story. He was an agent. He found himself constantly educating his clients about real estate, which is the way that I ended up going. That’s why I love working on bigger pockets because I love teaching people.

I love explaining it. I don’t necessarily love jumping up and down with you when I hand you your keys, shrieking. There’s people that love that and I want them here. I want them making my clients really happy but that’s not what I should be doing. You don’t want me to be the person handing you your keys. It’s going to be really hard for me to get as emotionally into it as you are.

It’s one of the things I said earlier. I love real estate sales not because I love the sales side of it, I love the fact that it’s like business with training wheels. You can find people to handle the aspects of the job that you’re not good at and they’re looking for you. They’re looking for a person that’s organized and knowledgeable and has created a world that they can thrive in.

Aaron: Yes. I love that, because there’s two different perspectives there. Our conversation started with, “Hey, how do you scale your business? I’m an agent right now. How do I scale?” “Oh, you focus on what you like, you come up with a system and then you do the stuff.” That’s totally one option. Another option is you go, “Hey, I’m really good at this. I’m going to go try to plug myself into a team,” that they will do that too.

I tell you what, if you live anywhere within 150 miles of the Bay area and you’re one of our listeners– David’s office up here in Roseville, it’s a couple hundred miles from where he is right now. Really within 150 miles to the Bay area and you’re one of those people that gets really, really excited and really, really bubbly but you haven’t been able to dial in those systems, reach out to David about his– He is growing his team right now. He talked about how big it’s going to get.

Maybe you’re one of those two people that are going to be the great fit as he adds on out there. Every time I get to talk to you, I try to tell people head your way because it is a real offer. Every time I tell people to reach out to my Instagram, I get several people that’ll ask me questions, that’ll email me. I coach people on it and I just give them some advice or we get to answer some of their questions here.

Something cool that you recently did is you just opened up a mortgage brokerage and so that’s been a pretty unique way. I had Jeff Cohn on here talking about what was the first thing he added. I think he added construction first and then it was mortgage and then escrow. He’s got a bunch of different businesses. The guy, a week ago, he heated title company first and then mortgage. You also have a flipping company that you do but you do mostly investing and partnering with people on that.

Then you got into, mortgage is your new business so as you look at scaling that, was it super hard to make the change? Was it fairly easy? It’s a loaded question. The guy that had the mortgage company, last week after he got on the podcast, people reached out and said, “Hey, can I send people to your mortgage company? If I want to open up an office, can I open up a David Greene mortgage office in my office in Soquel?” Just talk about mortgage for a little bit, talk about all that stuff.

David: The reason I did this was I found myself with so many of my clients doing the loan officer’s job in a lot of ways. Sometimes it was literally their job, like they need to send this thing out, they need to explain this to a client. I was doing it. Other times it was not things that the loan officer would have considered their job but I thought it would be. Did you go over with them their options on the rate and what they could pay to buy it down and what the delta would be in their payment? Did we even look at that?

In many cases, people don’t realize this, let’s say you can buy your rate down for $6,000 and save yourself $80 a month or something like that. You can offer to pay 506,000 instead of 500,000 for the house. Ask for a $6,000 credit. It’s all the same to the seller. In fact, the seller prefers it because their ego gets to see that they made over 500. Use that $6,000 to buy down your rate. You’re going to spend $20 a month more on the extra money that you borrowed, but you’re going to save $80 because of the rate.

There is a small trade-off there since you borrowed a little bit more money, but it’s usually a better financial situation for the client. I found myself looking at it because when we’re representing our clients, I’m doing it like if it was me that was buying this house, how I would do it. I found myself constantly trying to figure out why didn’t the lender, explain this to the person.

I just got frustrated with lenders not doing it the way I would do it. I got my broker’s license. I got my NMLS license and I started doing loans specifically, so I could help save our clients more money. Then what I found was that I liked it more. It was more fun than having to deal with the sides of real estate that I was already leveraging off. For me, it was a great fit. It fits with my personality. I’m very numbers-based. I’m very efficient. I like to look at how all the pieces fit together. Lending gives me the ability to do that much better. With the other agents who bring me, their clients, their buyer, clients, I like making that agent look good by saving their client money.

Some realtors may say, “Ah, I’m not the numbers guy. I love helping with the move. I love making the clients happy.” They could look into starting a moving company. They get a couple of moving trucks. They hire some people to help with the moves. They say, “Hey, if you sell your house with me, I give you half off of our moving services.” Then they go to other realtors and they say, “Hey, if you clients need help moving, I’ll give them 10% off if you send them my way or something like that.” They can start that type of a business to do more work.

The reason I specifically got into the mortgage side was that my passion is in the financial side of real estate, using it to build wealth. If I can save my clients $40 a month for the next 30 years, I get juiced up about that. I get really excited about it more than just, “Don’t you guys love that apricot tree in the back. You’re going to be eating apricots for the next 30 years.” Because I just recognize my personality works this way, I took those steps.

Aaron: What great advice to be able to. Lending can be a strategy, especially in a time like this when affordability is one of those things. When I did the calculation before buying my own houses, if I was going to own a house for more than say, two years, two, or three years, then the buydown paid for itself, right?

David: Yes.

Aaron: If you’re going to refine a year or you’re going to sell it in a year or two, the buydown usually doesn’t. Kind of the balance that I saw was somewhere between year two and year three, it had paid for itself and then after that, it was just discounts. Knowing that there’s strategy in that, and being able to have expertise in both will help you, it’ll help your agents.

I think that’s really, really strong when you’re out there. As agents are competing to be the best, being able to say, “Hey, we also do mortgage. We do it because we can help you and we can get you a better deal and we can save you money.” It’s all about being able to provide value as we get to kind of change lives as we’re doing it. What’s your favorite part about real estate?

David: The boring way it can build wealth for people. If we’re really honest with ourselves, why most people aren’t ready for retirement or don’t build wealth is a lack of discipline. They’re not good at saving money. They’re not good at telling themselves, no. How do I want to say this? I’ve naturally just been pretty good understanding money since I was a little kid, and so people that are not good with it were always just kind of confusing to me. Like, “Why is that really hard?”

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that every one of us has their own thing like that. There’s people that are in incredibly good shape that look at people that are overweight and say, “Why is this so hard? Just don’t eat the ice cream, eat the broccoli. What’s the big deal?” I’ve noticed that if you have an area that is naturally easy or you’re good at, it’s your responsibility to help the people that are not naturally good there. That’s one of the ways you can just be a good person, is if it’s easy for me to pick up that heavy box because I’m a bigger guy, don’t make that the 90-pound kid pick up that box because that’s going to be super hard for them.

I love real estate because it forces you to be disciplined. It forces you to make smart financial decisions. You’re renting for 1800 a month. You buy a property, you pay 2200 a month. In four years, your rent would have been $2,200. Now every single year you’re saving money that you don’t even have to use discipline to do, and you’re paying off a mortgage and the property is going up in value. 20, 30 years later, even if you had no discipline and that was the only good decision you made, you’ve benefited hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then you can repeat that really easy.

I think that’s the part that’s always been so appealing to me is that it’s, one, amount of work. Like the stress of going through an escrow, the saving of the money, the signing of the documents and making the decision, all the anxiety that no one likes when they say home buying is stressful, that now is done and you benefit for the rest of your life. That there’s always been a piece of that that I’ve loved because most things in life, you learn how to do it and then you have to keep doing it. Fitness is a never-ending battle. You’re always going to be exercising and trying to eat better than you want.

Aaron: There’s no horizontal income and fitness.

David: That’s exactly right.

Aaron: You don’t get skinnier while you sleep, for sure.

David: Yes. In real estate, yes. You hit it on the head. It can be one effort and good decision that’s like planting a tree that will produce fruit forever.

Aaron: One of the girls that I recently interviewed on here, Rachel Richards, she’s either going to be, having her before this one or right after. She talked about building wealth in real estate while only making $50,000 a year. It was because of discipline and systems, and there’s a lot of different versions that are inside there. One of our big missions this year, as we’ve talked to all of our real estate agents out there, and one of the best reasons I love being able to talk to David, is we’ve been trying to encourage all of you listeners, don’t just be a real estate agent.

Now, even if you were the best real estate agent, even if you are a fantastic real estate agent and you’re absolutely crushing it and you’re the best at your craft. Take that money and take that discipline to do other things too. To do other things too, that are investments. As a real estate agent, even if you’re somebody new at an office of 100 agents, you are an entrepreneur, you are in charge of your own fate. You are starting to control your own expenses, your own time, your own hours, and you’re going to see an output with that.

A lot of that income that we get through real estate and being agents, and I learned this the hard way. I’ve talked about it a bunch of times. I made a ton of money from 2009 to 2012, buying houses and flipping houses and I didn’t invest anything, maybe millions of dollars. In 2013, I lost all of our savings, all of our money because we didn’t have any– We had it in savings and cash instead of investments. When my world turned and my business turned, I had lost it all.

When I started doing it again, I started buying rentals and businesses and other things. It wasn’t that I was making any more money this different time around when I found it, but I was just putting myself in a better place. When COVID hit and coronavirus hit, it just felt a little bit more– Like one or two of my businesses have completely failed since March, but I’ve had enough doing well that life has been good and stable, different, but good and stable.

I love being able to talk to David because David he was a cop and then he was an agent. He would buy some houses and now you’ve expanded to so many different things. Like everything, real estate, and investments, and things like that. Take it from both of us when we’re saying out there, as you’re being a successful agent, keep your eye on the prize for what are some other things that you can be doing where you can plant that tree and be able to have that income later.

We’ve learned in COVID we need to have backup plans for stuff. For whether it’s cities, whether it’s businesses, whether it anything. I used to think there was some of my business plans that were just bulletproof and unstoppable and I had no thought like, “Well, what if foreclosures just completely get canceled for a year? What if they just say no one can get foreclosed on anymore?” I didn’t have that as my “What if might happen out there.”

David, as we wrap this up, and for those of you guys that are listening, we had split this podcast into two different podcasts because of how long it went and how much info we had. I knew that David and I would be bringing you guys so much. If you’re making it out of the end, thank you for being here for it. Hopefully, you’ve had a lot of fun with us. David, what are some final thoughts about, I guess maybe you hit it on the head already, about real estate and business in COVID? Do you have any books that you’re working on right now?

David: Yes. Thank you for asking that. The book I’m working on right now is going to be a three-part series. It’s funny, it’s a lot of what we’ve just talked about. It’s going to be a book written for real estate agents who want to make more money and grow their business.

Aaron: Man, I just teed you up on accident so perfectly, that was brilliant.

David: Yes. That worked out really good.

Aaron: I look really brilliant.

David: Here’s the cool thing, it’s published by the same person that just published your book. It’s from BiggerPockets Publishing. People can buy both of our books when they go on there at the same time. Everything I’m talking about right now, I know people are listening to this because they’re hungry. As you’re hearing us talk, you’re thinking, “Why did no one tell me this? That’s a good idea. How come I never heard it?” The training for real estates is, frankly, abysmal, real estate agents.

You go to your broker, you’re going to have a bazillion questions. You haven’t proven yourself. If they spent their whole day answering questions from brand new agents, they would never get anywhere. The reality is until you get some momentum and some traction, no, one’s going to take time to show you, unless you join a team and they’re kind of obligated to. I wanted to write a book for those people. The first book is due in December. It’s being edited right now and it’s going to be how to make it as a real estate agent.

For the newer people or the people that are not crushing it. Here’s the fundamentals that you have to understand about how to take listings, how to work with buyers, how to organize your day. Script objection handling, what do you do when someone says this? You say that? Well, how do you actually say it? Make sure you say it this way, not that way. The second book will be to make you a top producer. You’ve got the basics down. You want to learn how top producers act, what they do all day, what they do different than new people, here’s everything you have to know.

Then the third book of this series will be for what I call Rock Stars. Just like your show here. A Rock Star is an agent who has a team around them, but they’re not completely passive. This is not the Jeff Cohn, I’m just a CEO of a company. This is more like where I am right now. I still do listings, I still work with buyers, but I use admin and I use showing assistants to do the majority of the heavy lifting. I use the analogy that Tony Stark is the superhero, but he’s just a human. If he went out there to fight Danis himself, he’d get squashed like a bug in the first two seconds of the fight, it would be done.

His suit is what allows his brain which is a superpower to actually let him engage in this fight. His suit protects him, it keeps him safe. It allows him to manifest the brilliant ideas he has, he can know how to create a missile in his mind, but if he doesn’t have a suit that can shoot missiles, it doesn’t do any good. That’s what your team becomes. They are the people that protect you, protect your weaknesses from screwing you up. If you’re like me, and you’re not the most emotional person, they cover your six there, they cover your back, they make sure that that part gets handled in your business, and they allow the brilliance of what you do well to be amplified.

That’s what the third book in the series will be. If you go to biggerpockets.com/store, you can get Aaron’s book Bidding to Buy that you wrote with David Osborne, and then my series will be coming out.

Aaron: That’s awesome, man. I think you had told me before that you were working on the book series, but I didn’t realize how close it was and how it was tailored at real estate agents. Like we’ve said, listeners out there you know that Real Estate Rockstars, this is the podcast for real estate agents. If you like hearing from David Green, then you also need to go check out David Green on the BiggerPockets podcast for him and Brandon Turner, they invest a lot of investors they’re doing it.

We get so many people that apply to get on our podcast that actually are investors and flippers, not real estate agents. For the most part, we say no, because we want to focus on bringing value to real estate agents. That’s our niche, you guys are our customers, and that’s who we’re bringing. We’re going to focus on real estate, but add in some sprinkles of these extra things to go to, but if you got here, and you don’t want to be a real estate agent and you just want to be working on flipping houses, you want to know more about that stuff, their podcast is great for that, they’ve got us a whole series of them over there.

David, thanks for coming on again. Hopefully, you get to make it up to my house next week where we get to hang out, and hopefully, there’s slightly less smoke so we can even hang out outside. If someone wants to reach out to you, what’s the best way for them to find you?

David: If they want to talk about us doing a loan, the email is loans@davidgreene24.com. That’s the best way to get me there.

Aaron: You see that whole trick if you assign an email address for the function. You want to loan, loan@davidgreene.com.

David: That’s exactly right. Then if you want to get a hold of me, the best method is probably through Instagram, if you go I’m David green 24 on pretty much all social media, but I check Instagram the most. If you messaged me there, and we start talking, the people who I know I can help this person, that’s who I give my email to.

Then I get them into a different system so that we don’t miss people and I could get it administrators that are involved in scheduling the phone calls to talk with everybody. Keep listening to this podcast, guys. I’d love it if you listen to Biggerpockets as well, but I, at one point when I was new did not enjoy every day of working as an agent because I was doing everything.

When I got to the point that I could leverage off the stuff that I didn’t like all of a sudden, I love being a real estate broker and I get excited about going to work every day. There’s totally light at the end of the tunnel for you if you don’t love it. If you do love it, you can amplify that. You can love it 10 times as much when you get the right people around you. You’re definitely in the right place if you’re listening to Aaron here.

Aaron: Yes, the last time I interviewed David, he talked about all the fun stuff they learned on this podcast back when Pat Hiban was the host and how much he applied that and it totally changed his business. Real estate rockstars, thank you for listening. Go follow David on Instagram, David Greene with an extra e at the end. G-R-E-E-N-E 24. You can find me on Instagram too at Aaron Amuchastegui or at RE rockstars. Thank you for listening and we’ll talk again soon.