If I Can Do This From A Wheelchair, Anyone Can Do It

If I Can Do This From A Wheelchair, Anyone Can Do It

Daniel: My name is Daniel Riegel. I’m from Galatia, Illinois. I’d say the biggest challenge for doing this for me is I’m in a wheelchair. So, I don’t go in to the properties, I don’t look at them – not very often – sometimes I do. If I’m buying the property for myself. Comps, you know, finding the correct value of something. So, now I have several people in place that can help me with that.

Daniel: I got to the point of financial independence because I started out with the For Rent Method and I took that money and I rolled it into buying properties with the zero down structures. And then of course I still did the lease options and just kind of kept doing. Rinse and repeat until I had a pretty good portfolio built up and income coming in.

Daniel: I got to the point where I had my portfolio built up within two years of joining the program and then I had a pretty steady income coming in and a pretty sizable net worth. More of the same, really. You just start out with the For Rent Method and you’re going to call up sellers. You’re going to call up people that want to rent their house. Let them know what you do, lease option those homes. The tenant buyers are going to pay you an assignment fee for structuring the deal and then you just use that money and roll it into some other way of acquiring properties in one of the zero down structures.

Daniel: Last week I bought, well, Joe and I, bought two houses and I bought one. Every month I try to buy two houses. And then in between that I’m selling some, you know, assigning my deals, the lease options, on some properties. There are some people that I still do that for. Not very many these days, mostly I just do it for myself and Joe.

Daniel: I use all the zero down structures. I prefer the land contract. I have a guaranteed payment program. Generally, the properties, they need some repair, so I’ve got a construction company and I’ve got subcontractors that come in an repair the homes. A lot of times I’ll do a subject to where I take over payments on properties. Those homes I have to be a little more particular about. They don’t require as much work. A lot of times they’re, you know, clean and paint and you just take over the payments, clean and paint, move in a tenant buyer. Get your money back that you’ve put into the property and then just continue to do it over and over.

Daniel: Joe and I have worked on several deals over the past year, year and a half. We’ve done several fix ‘n’ flips. We’re starting to do more buy and holds, subject to’s, land contract – really anything. We’ve done a lot of cash deals. So all the structures, really. I like to do them all. I live in a lower end market so I have to do everything that’s in the tool box. And in order to make deals work I have to, sometimes I have to use every option available.

Daniel: A lot of the collaborations with Joe, I mean, I could talk about each one, really. They’re all different. Some we’ve bought real low cash prices, and then we’ve gone in and fixed them up and then sold them with a realtor on MLS. So, we’ve just done the fix ‘n’ flip thing. Other properties we have acquired them, whether it’s subject to or land contract, go in, fix them up a little bit, and sell them to one of our tenant buyers.

Daniel: So, really, we’ve done two subject to’s, we’re working on another subject to, two land contracts, we’re working on another land contract. And one, two, three like, five cash, cash deals where we’ve fixed ‘n’ flipped them. Right now I’m trying to put together a couple deals, like I said, one’s a subject to. They’re refinancing with the bank. And then we’ll take over the payments after they’ve refinanced it. We’ve got to go in and do a little bit of fix up on that house. Not much because it’s a subject to. So, some clean and some paint. A few minor repairs.

Daniel: Then another one, a land contract that is going to require some repairs. And two that we just bought in cash Friday. So they need to be fixed. But they’re going to be a long term investment that we’re going to fix and hold and work with the tenant buyer so that they can have a nice place to live and buy it from us.

Daniel: I started the program in March 2015. I had a property that I’d bought as a foreclosure. It was going to be a fix ‘n’ flip. But the market still wasn’t very strong. I was not able to sell it conventionally so I started looking into lease options, alternative ways that I could sell the property. And I came across Joe’s material and watched a lot of his videos and then I talked to Joe a few times and that was it. And then I signed up for the mentor program and that week, I think, he was having a buying event that weekend. So I drove here for the buying event, and as they say, it’s history.

Daniel: The biggest take away that caused me to join Joe’s mentor program, and I’ve heard this from other mentor students, too, just that he’s very genuine. He’s the same person on camera that he is off camera. He’s very knowledgeable about this stuff. You can read many books about it. I have. The problem is whenever you go to do a deal, they’re all different. Every deal is different. The numbers are different, the homes are different, they all have different situations. The sellers are different. So reading a book is not that helpful because you think you know what you’re doing until you get there to the deal and then you don’t. And if you don’t have a mentor, you’ve just got to stumble your way through it, or, lost the deal completely.

Daniel: Which can be thousands and thousands of dollars, you know, depending on where you’re at. It could be hundreds of thousands of dollars if you don’t know what you’re doing. Or if you do it wrong, you know, your reputation means more than your money. So if you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re trying to figure it out on your own, you’re going to have a hard time. You might get lucky and you might get a couple of really good deals, but you might lose them instantly just from not knowing what to do and not saying the right things. You know, it’s very easy to tell the seller, oh, well, I’m not sure what that answer is. But, I do work with another investor that has done thousands of these deals. Let me find out and I’ll call you back. That’s pretty easy. You can’t do that without a mentor.

Daniel: Really, join the mentor program. Start learning this stuff. Then you can have someone to hold your hand. Whenever you have a problem you can ask them what the answer is. Start off with the For Rent Method. It’s probably the least risky way to do anything in real estate. I mean, wholesaling is too. Wholesaling and the For Rent Method are about the same amount of risk. But I don’t like wholesaling as much. The For Rent Method is better. You know, you’re going to offer the sellers, you’re going to get a better deal on their house. They’re going to get better buyers. They’re going to make more money. The tenant buyers are going to have a house that they couldn’t acquire in any other way and you’re going to make money for solving the problem and putting it all together.

Daniel: So that’s probably the best way to get started in this. And then, like I said, just take the money from that, don’t buy new shoes, don’t spend it, don’t throw it away. Reinvest it back into your self-education and your business, continue doing it and build up your own portfolio, you know? The biggest benefit to being a full time real estate investor is acquiring your time back, you know, you’re not stuck at a nine to five job. It’s not easy. Nothing is super-easy when you start out. It does get easier. I’m at year four now. Most people call me. It’s pretty easy what I do. But, the first couple years I had to grind. I mean, it’s like anything else. You’ve got to learn it. You’ve got to do the work. You’ve got to put in the work. That will help you get the time back eventually. So, you’ll have time, you’ll have money, you’ll have the freedom to do what you want to do, when you want to do it pretty much.

Daniel: Really, listening to people. Listening to their problems so that you can decide how to solve them. You can’t fix the problem if you don’t even listen to the problem. And a lot of people they want to jump right in and say they’ve got a solution. But they don’t know what the problem is in the first place. So you’ve got to learn to listen. There’s so many things. I mean, really, you’ve constantly go to improve yourself, reevaluate yourself, see what your problems are so that you can fix your own problems. Then once you’ve fixed your own problems you can help other people fix their problems. This is really a problem solving business. You learn how to listen, discover what the problem is and then you know what strategies you need to do to help someone solve that problem And then you get paid for it.

Daniel: Typically, the offers that I make on a rural property, they’re all different. It depends on how much work they need, or, what the situation of the seller is. Of course it’s hard to do just a blank offer on something. But let’s say the seller doesn’t live in the property, they don’t have a mortgage on the property, the property is in a little bit of disrepair. You can offer them a guaranteed payment where, basically a land contract, where you will pay them X amount of dollars for that property. You’ll go in an fix the property, then turn around bring in a lease option tenant to pay you back so that you can recoup some of the money from that property. If they have a mortgage on the property, you’re not really going to want to do that.

Daniel: Typically, the offers that I make on a rural property, they’re all different. It depends on how much work they need, or, what the situation of the seller is. Of course it’s hard to do just a blank offer on something. But let’s say the seller doesn’t live in the property, they don’t have a mortgage on the property, the property is in a little bit of disrepair. You can offer them a guaranteed payment where, basically a land contract, where you will pay them X amount of dollars for that property. You’ll go in an fix the property, then turn around bring in a lease option tenant to pay you back so that you can recoup some of the money from that property. If they have a mortgage on the property, you’re not really going to want to do that.

Daniel: You’re going to want to do a subject to, take over the payments. If there’s a lot of equity in the property, you might want to do something a little bit different. You might want to do a multi-mortgage situation. Most of the time I’m just going to take over the payments. Most of the time, whenever you do a subject to, there’s not a lot of equity in the property. If there was, they could probably come down on their price and sell it in any other way, unless they just don’t want to. So, it just depends on the situation, really, what you can do.

Daniel: The biggest difference between a cash deal and a terms deal is going to be money. You know, if you don’t have the money, you can’t do a cash deal. You can get some pretty good deals doing a cash deal. You can get it substantially under market value. You actually have to get it substantially under market value to make any money on it, to fix it and flip it. If you’re doing a terms deal, you don’t necessarily need very much money to acquire the property. You need a little bit of money, maybe you need a little bit of money down, typically not. But you’re going to need money to fix it. Whether it’s just paint and flooring, you still need a few thousand dollars. Then you fix it and then at that point you can sell it on the MLS, you can sell it for sale by owner, you could sell it to a tenant buyer which is what I prefer to do. But you could sell it outright in cash.

Daniel: That’s going to yield you a bigger ROI if you can buy it on proper terms. But, if you can get it really low, for a cash price that makes sense, too. It all just depends on the situation.

Daniel: Well, kind of a snapshot of my business day. I work a lot more than I planned on working, earlier. When I started this program I kind of wanted to get out of work. Kind of lazy. But now, the more that I do it I really enjoy working. So I try to work as much as I possibly can, while I can. In a couple years I might not feel like working. I don’t have to. I could have retired last year, you know? I’d say by the end of this year I will be semi-retired. And I’ll just do stuff for me and Joe. You know, we’ll do some fix ‘n’ flips and some of the same stuff over and over. But I don’t have to spend much time on cold calls. A lot of people call me.

Daniel: Depending on what I’m doing. Right now, I’m working on a property for myself. I’ve got subcontractors that are working on all the other properties that we’re fixing and flipping. So, I spend a lot of time working on my own house because I enjoy doing it. Financially, it might not be the best idea, but I like to do it. You can, you can sub it all out, really. You make more money, actually, if you let some other, you know, some other contractor come in and tell you what needs to be done, how much it’s going to cost. You’ve got solid numbers, you can get it done. So you really don’t have to know anything about construction or real estate or anything to be involved in this. You can just build a team that does all that stuff for you.

Daniel: Then you just manage your managers. So it’s not like you have to know these things in order to do it. Anybody can do it. If I can do it out of a wheelchair, anybody can do it. All you’ve got to do is pick up a phone. And you’re not going to be very good on the phone at first. You’re going to suck. That’s just how it is. Anything that you do, you’re going to fail at it for a little bit. You’ve got to be prepared. It’s not really a failure. It’s, you know, there’s a difference between failing at something and being a failure. A lot of people, they can’t differentiate that. So you’ve got to be able to separate it. And understand that you’re going to be terrible at it. You’re going to stumble over your words. You’re going to get hung up on. It’s going to be rough for a little bit. But it does get easier. Much easier. And much more profitable.