First Deal In 2 Weeks – Pt 2 of 4

Read Transcript for “First Deal In 2 Weeks – Pt 2 of 4”

 
Jim: After we cut the video together and we finished doing that, I actually started investing myself. The first deal that I ever got was about 2 weeks after I actually started doing it. I put my signs up. I got phone calls right away. The first deal I ever did was a subject-to deal not too far from my house. This was two weeks after I started. I made $4,000 the day that I signed that house. I made $200 a month and when I sold the house, I made another $15,000 on what we call the back end of the deal. So I made $4,000 up front, I made $200 a month and made another $15,000 when we closed it. And that was the first deal that I ever did and that was literally within two weeks of me starting.
 
Jim: And so not only had I seen it work, not only did I watch it work and not only did I film it, but when I was able to implement it, it worked right away. So obviously that was really cool, because now I’m making money.
 
Jim: After the first deal, I started doing those pretty regularly. One of the things that I wanted to touch on though is that during that time frame, one of the neat things about Joe’s program, one of the neat things about what we do, is that it’s always changing and evolving in the styles and stuff. So after my first deal, I started doing those pretty regularly, all similar kind of deals, $4,000 on the front end, a couple hundred dollars a month, and those were really nice.
 
Jim: One of the really neat things, and where I took my business, was the invention that came out of Joe’s program of the “For Rent Method”. That, to me, was the best thing to come into investing that I’ve ever seen. And now I’m real familiar with lots of the other teachers because I do a lot of it and the “For Rent Method” literally exploded my business and how I looked at it. I think that when everybody starts, I always tell people this: “When you start, you try and define what you want investing to do for you.” And so I was very successful at it when I started doing it, but when he came up with the “For Rent Method” that changed my life and that changed my business. Because, there was a business model there that I saw that was very important and most importantly, it tied everything together, and I think that it filled a gap that nobody else taught, and that was the ability to do many more houses per month and adding that to the tool belt or the repertoire, so to speak.
 
Jim: The first time that we ever did the For Rent method, at that time I was starting to work with Joe, I was starting to work with the program, and I was starting to teach a little bit and team lead. The For Rent Method – I love my For Rent Method story – as I was on my way down to Indianapolis, Joe had kept talking about the For Rent Method, the For Rent Method, and I was really busy actually doing the other investor stuff, so I was doing a lot of land contracts, a lot of subject-to’s, and I was really quite busy.
 
Jim: Joe had kept wanting to talk about it and I didn’t really have the time to do that. So I was headed down to Indianapolis for one of the buying events. We talked about it briefly on my way down and Joe said, ‘This is absolutely incredible. You have to see this. This is just brilliant.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ And we got down and Joe taught it, and then I had to go up into a room with a bunch of brand new people and teach them this.
 
Jim: Now, I hadn’t touched this. This isn’t something that I did yet. But I listened to the speech and I got the concept. Joe and I had some time to talk. So I grabbed a script, I grabbed a cell phone and I grabbed a newspaper from Indianapolis, and picked up the phone. Now I broke off and took a bunch of new students that were looking to me for support. And I hadn’t done one of these deals yet.
 
Jim: So I pick up a cell phone, I pick up a newspaper and I put the very first deal together using a script and a cell phone on a deal that I’d never done before. And not only did I do the first one but I did the second one. And out of the ten people in my room, we ended up putting about 40 deals together in a couple of hours. Now THAT changed my life. I mean, that changed my investing life tenfold. It made me change my business, it made me invent a whole business model and it made my business explode – absolutely explode.
 
Jim: I have one of the most interesting, fascinating companies now that everybody finds absolutely incredible by doing the For Rent Method. It allows me to move no money down deals. It allows me to do 5 to 6 deals a month. It allows me to bring in hundreds of buyers sometimes a week. The interesting thing about it is that again, like with everything when you start it, it starts as one thing, but what it ended up being is this base or this model for the business that I have now which is Alley West. And Alley West has actually grown to Chicago and Michigan and California and Massachusetts, so my company is actually going national with the business model that I have. And it allows me to go in a hundred different directions just because of this one idea. It allowed me to completely explode my business.
 
Jim: I knew it was right because I could teach it to brand new people. I could teach it to brand new people. Not only was I able to do a deal with literally my first deal doing the For Rent Method and not only doing my first deal with the first phone call out of a town that wasn’t my own, but I was able to teach it to a bunch of other people that day. Not only that, but I was able to teach it to an 18 year old girl. One of the students in my room there had brought her daughter with her and she was a teenager – she got 6 deals in that afternoon! I mean, we’re talking somebody who had absolutely no background on real estate investing – and she was able to do 6 deals. So, not only did I understand what Joe and what that had meant, my mind – I don’t think I slept that night because my mind had completely gone. I knew we were onto something that nobody else could do.
 
Jim: In my life as an investor, that was probably the most defining moment ever – the day that I learned how to do that. That changed my life.
 
Jim: Because of learning the For Rent Method, what came out of that, out of our group – all of the sudden with one really good idea, we had the ability to put deals together like never before. I mean, we did really good at it before, but now we had something that was entirely different. Now we were bringing in 30 buyers sometimes in a day.
 
Jim: Just as an example, one weekend I decided to see how many For Rent Method deals that I could put together. On a Saturday I put 15 deals together. And I think I remember totaling up the houses. It was 5.6 million dollars’ worth of houses in 15 deals by myself in one weekend. The buyers that came in after that – now, when you’re dealing with 15 houses, here’s an entirely different business now.