Joe: What's going on, everybody, Joe McCall, Real Estate Investing Mastery podcast. Glad you're here. On this podcast, we're going to be doing a Part two episode with Zack Boothe. Zack Boothe is somebody I interviewed for as I'm recording this about three episodes ago, where he went on a 40-day challenges goal is to make 40 grand in 40 days in a brand new market. And part one, we dove deep into a lot of kind of why he was doing it, but not necessarily the how maybe. And I want to do in part to dove more into the details of kind of what he did, how he did it, the apps that he used, the software, the phone scripts, how he got them under contract, all those good juicy details, which I know you are interested in hearing as well. It's a cool story. Zack has been on my podcast a couple of times before. Really nice, humble guy who is really doing deals and crushing it in this business. And he's one of the good guys. So I'm glad to have him on the podcast as I'm recording this right now.

Joe: We're live on Facebook and YouTube. So hello, all of you, all out in social media world. To my good friends who are listening to this audio podcast, I'm glad you guys are here. You've been listening to my podcast for over ten years, which is amazing. I'm well over a thousand episodes now. I don't even know what my total download count is, but it's in the millions. Last I checked, it was like almost six million. So I'm really humbled and appreciative if you guys listening to this podcast, it does mean a lot to me. And it means a lot to me when you leave reviews on iTunes or Apple podcast, whatever it's called. Now, here's the crazy thing. I just read this morning that Spotify will soon be the number one podcast playing platform on the interweb, replacing Apple podcast, which is just crazy. So I've never been a huge Spotify fan. Maybe I need to become a Spotify fan. I have nothing against Spotify. But those of you listening on Spotify. Hi. How's it going? I don't think there is a way you can leave a review on Spotify as if there is somebody let me know. All right.

Joe: So those of you watching right now on Facebook and YouTube, please, this is the time to share like this video comment down below. Tell me where you're from. Say hi. And if you have any questions for Zack or any questions about driving for dollars or serious questions, like, is this for real? Are you guys legit? Can prove it like so we'll take any and all of your questions or type them in the Facebook and the YouTube comments. And if we see them live here, we'll put them up on the screen and answer your questions. OK, one more piece of announcement. This podcast is brought to you by PartnerwithJoe.net. So it's my new program. I'm so excited about it. I created a new software that helps you create offers. It helps you create cash offers, lease option offers and owner financing offers and giving away the cash offer system for free. And when you put in the numbers, it helps you come up with two different cash offers. You can pick which one and then it puts it all together in this beautiful proposal that you can just send us an email to them, mail it to them, text to them, and it's really awesome. And then if you're interested, there's a training video you can go to PartnerWithJoe.net to watch it on, teach you a little bit how to use it. I give you an opportunity to sign up for a new class that I have that teaches you how to get your first check in the fastest way possible to just seven bucks. But you can get the calculator for free, go to if you go to PartnerWithJoe.net. So check that out.

Joe: I'm getting amazing feedback from that. People love it and I'm excited about. OK, one more thing. I just thought of two on Wednesdays. So starting tomorrow as I'm recording this, I'm doing a brand new podcast series called Creative Financing Lab with Pace Morby and Matt Theriault which is a lot of fun. So we're rolling right along. But it's going to be a weekly podcast series where we just get together and talk about creative financing deals. Pace is a legend, material is a legend. And so we get to come together once a week on a live podcast. We're going to be answering your questions, talking about deals, all things creative financing, subject to lease options, all that good stuff. So join us live on Wednesdays at nine a.m. Central, I believe Wednesdays, 9:00 a.m. Central. Let me just get in here. No, no, no. 10:00 a.m. Central. So 11:00 a.m. Eastern, 8:00 a.m. Pacific. OK, we're going to be live and we want to I want to get it to over a thousand people watching live at once. So we'll figure that out how to do that. We released those again as an audio podcast later on all of our channels, Pace and Matt. They're just super cool dudes. I love hanging out with them, talking about business with them. And so we you're invited to listen it. They're going to be a lot of fun. OK, you ready to bring Zack on? Enough of the chit chat, Joe. Let's get right into the podcast. Let me see if I can find my mouse. There it is. And Zack, how are you? Zack Boothe, ladies and gentlemen.

Zack: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Joe. Good to be back.

Joe:  Glad you're here, man. You're going to Alaska in a few weeks. I think you were just telling me a minute ago.

Zack: Yeah, yeah. Just booked plane tickets to Alaska. And Friday I'm actually going to New Mexico as well. So a lot of play.

Joe: I love Alaska. Yeah, I love Alaska. It's so cool. All right. So on the last podcast that we talked about, your trip to Florida and you were supposed to be there for forty days, it turned out to just be twenty eight days, get to leave early because your wife's family had a little emergency in Brazil and she was there with her with your kids and visiting her family. Right. In Brazil, and it was not easy. It was hard, as hard as a lot of work, but it was just the emotionally hard part of being gone from your family. So you're there in Tampa in your new market. You're from you're from Utah. You're in Tampa doing this challenge. You're driving four dollars and you still had tremendous success. What are the latest numbers if you close any deals yet? I think you're working on a couple. You have a couple more coming. What were what are the kind of final numbers now and how long were you actually there in Tampa?

Zack: Yeah, so I ended up being there about twenty-seven days. I flew out day twenty-eight, but about afternoon a day twenty-seven is when I got the, you know, information that my family all had covid my father in law was going to be hospitalized and you know, families first always. And so I had to go get a COVA test to fly to Brazil. I had my passports for emergency situations if I did need to go down in my family. So I just called it, called it early and called my cell phone company to make sure I can make calls while in Brazil just to do my follow ups, which I actually ended up getting two contracts while I was in Brazil. Just for my followups, just for people I talk to.

Joe: Oh, the power follow ups.

Zack: Yep. So and I'm sure there's more to come to from what I did. You know, there's still stuff in my follow up, but we the grand total was we got seven total purchase contracts between the two when I was in Brazil. So within the 40 days, I got seven contracts, two of those contracts. So do you want to break down like. Yeah, each deal how much I made. OK, so let's start with the ones that didn't work out. Right, because in this business, sometimes it doesn't work out. So let's talk about those. So I got two of those that didn't work out. The first one was a completely vacant house, had people living in it like a year and a half, didn't need a ton of work and put it under contract. I knew I was a little bit high, but I thought I could pull probably ten grand, which I did. I got a purchase offer for ten thousand from a larger investment company. So I was going to make ten thousand dollars on the assignment. But once we were going through and doing the inspections, there was some mold that was found and some other things that happened ended up to where I just couldn't make any money. A signing the contract. I tried to renegotiate with the sellers. They wouldn't have it, so I had to cancel that agreement.

Zack: So that was kind of a bummer from the other contract that didn't work out. I'm pretty confident I could have made anywhere between 20 and 40 grand a signing it. I was good on price condition everything was there. But when we did the title work, there was a judgment against the owner of the house for seventy thousand dollars, and that judgment wiped out all of the profits for her and all the profits to me. And it just was upside down there. Probably a year there, over a year now in default on the mortgage as well. So that deal will probably end up in foreclosure, which is so terribly sad because she only owes, I think, shows like one thirty on the mortgage with all the not paying the mortgage in a year, all the attorney fees, all the back interest payments, pre foreclosure expenses, of course. And then and then also the judgment. She's just upside down at this point. So which is just too too bad. I feel bad for her. But, you know, a lot of people actually it kind of brings me to the point. A lot of people think that we only do deals with people that are down on their luck and are really behind on their payments. And I hate those deals. The worst deals ever. There's always judgments. There's always liens. They're the hardest ones. My favorite is extremely wealthy, extremely well-off people that just don't want to deal with them.

Zack: They know they're giving away to discount. A lot of them have done more real estate deals than me. Those are my favorite leads. All right. So anyway, so those were those two deals. And then day four of the challenge, my favorite of the challenge, if you guys want to watch just one episode before I got three purchase contracts. So all three of those are working out. And that was I actually had him on my podcast. I interviewed him and his wife the other day to have him on the podcast. Yeah, they're very, very wealthy people. He was talking about lease options and taking over mortgages, and he had been in the business for four years. Decades. Right. I mean, he's probably done more deals than me, and I love those two. There were super fun. His name's Jerry. And anyway, he's fantastic. But those two of his properties, they're worth about one hundred. The two that I kept for myself, there was probably about one hundred and ten to one hundred thousand dollars. I got him for sixty-one thousand, including closing costs. Currently got tenants in with lease options, so meaning they're paying the rent with an option to buy. They're paying me about eight hundred dollars a month in rent and the option to buy is at one hundred and ten. So I've got him with a mortgage broker. They're trying to repair their credit and plan on purchasing them.

Zack: So those aren't wholesale fees. I don't necessarily think I can count that towards the 40 grand. I mean, that's one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of money, long term money that I have there or more. But then one of the properties that he had that he sold to me, we're going to assign it. We have a buyer lined up for fifteen thousand. We're supposed to close this week or next week. We had to get the tenants out. That was a requirement by the buyer. They had some bad tenants. We had to go through the eviction process that's finalized finally. So we just got to close on it. So we should close this week. If not next week, there's 15 grand. And then so that's five of the seven. The other two, one of them is closed. One of them, the one I actually got in Brazil is already closed. That one from follow up. My biggest deal, which is funny, are we made fifty-three thousand dollars on that one due straight assignment, so that was kind of fun, right, follow up in Brazil. Fifty-three thousand dollars already. I mean, just that one deal we hit the goal, which I was hopeful. I was hopeful we could get one big one banger, you know, to knock out the entire goal. And everything else would just be would be extra frosting. Right.

Zack: So we got that deal. And then the other one that I got was an inherited property. And he was an educated guy who understood construction costs. He understood that he could flip it. He had a flipper friend, but he you know, I offered the option of, hey, well, we'll pay for the probate. And if we can't close on it at this price, it'll all be at a loss. It'll be your property. It's my nonrefundable earnest money to pay for the probate and help you out. So that's what we did. We had to go through the probate process, which takes a couple of months. Right. So that has finally been finalized. A probate has been finalized. We found a buyer this week, actually, and we're going to make 30 grand on that one flat. Yeah, we're going to close either this week or next week. I know we have to close fast, so I'm pretty sure it's going to close this week. And today is only Tuesday. So by Friday it was supposed to close is what our closing date was with our new buyer. So that's awesome. Yes. I mean, just straight assignments, you know, they're not all close to one of them is closed for fifty-three. The other two is another forty-five thousand, so ninety-five thousand dollars in assignments. And then I have two rentals that will make me about one hundred thousand. So total revenue, if you count all of it, it's going to be close to or over two hundred thousand dollars in my pocket when it's all said and done.

Joe: I love it. You know, people got to understand this too. When you start getting into this business, it's not like you're going to get a check immediately in a week or two weeks or a month or two months. It's like people expect that and I get it. But it's not like you go to get a job and you start working in two or three weeks later, you get a paycheck. You know, I heard one guy talk about it. You need to dig your well before you're thirsty. Right. So when did you start this whole when did you go down to Florida, Zack?

Zack:  I went down, like, the first part of January.

Joe: All right. So this is the middle of April right now. I went down there four and a half months ago and you just starting to really see the fruits of this stuff at fifty-three-thousand-dollar deal. When did it close?

Zack: That one closed? I want to say roughly 30 days. I don't have the exact date, but it's roughly 30 days ago. But it was after the forty days was up right from the forty-day challenge. Yeah.

Joe: So and if you would have been able to stay there and focus on it, you might have closed some others faster. You might have gotten some new ones that you could close faster. Yeah, but people need to realize that when you're doing this, this is a business. You've got to give yourself some runway. You've got to give yourself three to six months. Yes. One hundred before you can start expecting to see the money coming in, because, you know, it's going to take you a month or two months of marketing and following up to get a deal under contract. And then it's going to take another thirty days to close that. So that's all right. There are two months. Right. And most of your if most of your deals come from the follow up, it's just something you got to understand. You know, I heard one guy explaining to me, this is one of my coaches at the very, very earliest parties like Joe, when you drive by a used car lot, there's only one car on the lot. Are you going to stop and look at that car?

Joe: Probably not if you drive and it's not very well lit, but if you drive by that parking lot and now it's well lit and there's lots of cars there, you're more likely to stop in. So my point is this. When you're selling your deals, if you don't have a lot of deals to sell, you're not going to get a lot of buyers. You're not going to get much interest in your deals because you're just kind of that used car lot with one car. Don't get discouraged, though. Keep on marketing. Be consistent with your marketing. Be consistent. You follow up and you will get more and more deals. And then it's just it's all momentum, isn't it? The momentum really starts to grow.

Zack: You know, that's something that I noticed when I was in my new market. You know, here in Utah, people in the wholesaling space or flipping space, the REIA groups, they know who I am for the most part. You know, I have people that are like, I don't even know how they get my cell phone number or my email. And they're like, can I can I get on your cash buyers list? Hey, do you got any deals in this in this area? And it's like I'm like outside the scenes. I don't do dispositions. I don't do acquisition manager. I don't do any of that part of the business here in Utah anymore. And I'm still getting interest. Right. People reaching out to me. But in Florida, I couldn't get anybody to take my calls. I couldn't get anybody call me back.

Zack: You know, I was a nobody. I was just like another new wholesaler as interesting. Yeah. It's funny how that works and, you know, give my company a couple of months down there in Tampa. Already, we've ramped up the marketing. I put an acquisition manager in place. I mean, I open a new market. I might as well write a bill to cash buyers list. I put a title company in place. It got purchase contracts, attorneys, all of the foundational pieces to have a company there. And so now we're doing deals down there. I think we got I think so far just this month, halfway through the month, I think we got two contracts down there this month.

Joe: I love it. By the way, Tiger. Scott, what's up? How are you? Miley, I believe here is also in Tampa. Cool. Awesome. I hope I got the name right there. Wow. Good job. Ascots in the house, Scott. How are you doing, man? And so a question from Guiselle. I believe we when you say. How big is Zack's team, better question, how is your team structured, Zack?

Zack: Yeah, so when I went to Florida to do the 40-day challenge is just me. Right. And I wanted to show that you don't have to have a giant team to get started and make an absolute fortune quickly, you know, and to get enough operating expenses to hire some people to help with some of the basic stuff. Right. But so far, when I say we as our team so far between Utah and Florida, so far for the year, the first quarter of the year, we did about dead even four hundred thousand dollars in revenue. And so it's quite a bit of income. And ninety nine percent of the 100 percent of that actually is from assignment fees. Right. I picked up four rentals as well on top of that. And so I've cherry picked them out of my pipeline so I didn't get assignments on those. So I have a signed and made four hundred thousand. And so you think, OK, how large of a team do you have to have that, you know, to do that? I have here in Utah, I have my main acquisition manager. Its name's Hayden, fantastic guy. And Miguel and Miguel does all of my marketing, all my systems. He does my driving for me here in Utah. And currently I only have one cold color. Sometimes we have anywhere between. We normally try and keep between two to three cold callers is all. And that's my team in Utah. That's it. And then in Florida, I now have an acquisition manager and a driver. That's it. That's the size of my team. We haven't quite ramped up Florida to the size that we can. I fully expect to be doing about a million a year in Utah and about a million and a half inFlorida with that size of team.

Joe: It's very cool. I want to ask you more specifically what your acquisition managers do, but I love the comments we're getting here. Robi's enjoying this live. Jazelle, I hope I got your name right. There you go. We've got Robert from the Gulf Coast here and I love this Jason from Perry, Texas. I'm sure they say it. Perry, right. Not Paris, but they say Perry in Texas.

Zack: I would have done that.

Joe: Yeah, who knows. But I'd be curious to know how you guys pronounce it. Jason in Texas. All right. Talk about your acquisition manager. And we got some of the questions that are coming in. Keep them coming. We're going to I'm going to ask them to Zack as we progress through this podcast. Here are your acquisitions manager in Utah. What does he do? Yep.

Zack: So my acquisition manager in Utah has been with me longer. And everybody he's been with me almost three years now. And, you know, I fell in love with coaching and that's where I want to spend the majority of my time. And so I've structured it to where he has a portion of the pie. He doesn't own any of the company, but he does get a profit share. And I have it based off of total revenue. And it's the more the more the company makes, the more he makes. So he's incentivized to grow the company. So he gets his base commissions that the that I pay my acquisition managers. So he does all of the acquisitions and all of the dispositions here in Utah. What that means, he negotiates and services all the leads that come into our company, gets all the contracts and then finds a buyer for him and he gets a commission on both sides of those.

Joe: But he's the one talking to the seller. Is negotiating getting under contract? Yeah, I had to go through doing it over the phone.

Zack: He goes on appointments, he does some over the phone. But, you know, you can do both. But I'm a big believer in going and building relationship, especially in competitive markets like Utah, because, you know, if you're competing on a deal and the sellers brother that he loves is going to pay the same amount you're going to pay, the brother is going to get the deal. People want to do business with people they like and you and they trust. And so if you are there in person building trusts and, you know, building a relationship with people and your offers are similar to the other offers, they're going to work with you. So that's kind of why we do that. So he does acquisitions dispositions here in Utah, but because of his profit share, he's also responsible for training and recruiting cold callers. He does a little bit of that with them and sits in and does the trainings there. He's also responsible for the other acquisition manager in Tampa for training him, coaching him, working through deals with him and keeping track all the deals, all the revenue. I honestly I have no idea how many deals I have under contract right now. I don't even know. I don't need to know because that's his responsibility. I look at my KPIs, what our outputs were, what our inputs are, and I look at my financials with my accountant. That's about all I have to do with the company. Now, because of

Joe: How did you find this guy?

Zack: He's a major outdoorsman like I am. And we kind of grew up in the same neighborhood. His dad is a doctor and just a really, really well-off family, really great people. And I knew their family. And he has a brother to my age, but he's like five or six years younger than me. So I don't really know him growing up. But he followed me on social media and I was posting pictures of big fish. So being an outdoorsman. We enjoyed that. And then I started posting about doing social media or on social media, about doing real estate and like what I was doing. And I did that because one of my mentors taught me that one of the best ways to recruit and grow a team is to share your successes and share the things you learn. You know, not to be egotistical or to be, you know, not to be flashy, but to share and add value to other people. Right. Not to be narcissistic, but to post things that could serve and help other people grow. And you might attract people in your company that want to help you accomplish your goals. And so I remember he actually messaged me. He said, hey, what's this real estate shindig? All about and that's kind of how it all started. So it was just a social media post that I posted and he asked me about it and I have a picture of him actually, before I had my nice office space here he was in my basement. I've got a picture of my little boy. He's like four at the time, hiding underneath his desk in my spare bedroom. And he's like cold calling there. So, you know, he's been with me pretty much from the start, cold calling, doing whatever I needed them to do.

Joe: How did you find your acquisitions manager in Florida?

Zack: Yeah, so his name is Brandon Harvey. You can actually see his success story on my YouTube channel, but he was a student of mine and he quickly had a lot of success and just my kind of guy just really clicked with him. And he was really good at building relationships with people. And I really think that's the main part of acquisitions. And when I started this idea of the 40 day challenge, I, you know, started reaching out to some people that I knew that were doing deals and said, do you want to be my acquisition manager when I leave? And I and I reached out to a couple people and a lot of people wanted to grow their own companies and be completely in charge of what they were doing. Brandon. All the value and decided that he wanted to be a part of our team instead of doing it on his own. Cool.

Joe: All right. So let's dove deep into the details of how you got these deals under contract. You've been doing deals a long time. You've done a lot of different kinds of marketing. Your favorite is driving for dollars and cold calling, is that right?

Zack: Yes, 100 percent.

Joe: All right. So you went down to Tampa. What did you do first thing?

Zack: Yeah, well, you know, before I went down, the only thing that I did is I made sure that I was legal. I got my purchase contracts and talked to an attorney.

Joe: How did you get your purchase contracts?

Zack: Yeah. So I have a purchase contract that I use here in Utah. But I got it from a real estate attorney that understands real estate wholesaling. Right. So I went and found an attorney and in Tampa area that understood real estate wholesaling. And I found him through just finding out who the wholesalers were in that market, just from Facebook groups and that kind of stuff. And then I reached out to them who they suggested could once I found that attorney.

Joe: Why didn't you use one of their contracts?

Zack: Because I already paid a thousand bucks to have a contract built, I just wanted them to review it and to make sure the contract worked.

Joe: So you sent your contract to use in Utah to the Florida attorney asking him to review it or her?

Zack: Is this attorney fine? And, you know, and that's what I suggest to my students and anyone listening in. You know, if you need a purchase contract, you can get them for free. There's a lot of people to give them away. I don't because I'm not an attorney and I want to open myself up to those kinds of issues. But make sure you have an attorney review it for your state. Yeah. So, I mean, I had a couple of different contracts and I had some issues with certain sellers. And it's it evolved into what we have and I like it. So that's what we use.

Joe: All right. So you found a good contract and you probably just started asking around and did you figure out of title company before you?

Zack: I mean, I knew of some you know, I knew of some. We ended up like that title company ended up being a nightmare. And even through the challenges like I have, this title company is not going to work out. So we've actually since found a different title company because we're still doing deals down there.

Joe: That's so normal, guys.

Zack: So normally, right? Yeah.

Joe: So in every deal is completely different. If you're wanting to get into a business that doesn't have any challenges, everything is super easy and always the same. Go do something else, right?

Zack:  Yeah, definitely.

Joe: I've had so many attorneys or hard money lenders or title companies are, you know, people in the industry who have said this guy is awesome. This attorney and property management company is amazing. This contractor is amazing and you just have a totally different experience with them. So it goes with the territory, is my point.

Zack: Yeah. And if you guys are in Utah or in Tampa area, reach out to me. You know, I'm happy to share my contacts for who I found for attorneys who I found for title companies I'm happy to share. Yeah, that's a secret. I mean, they take care of me. They add a lot of value to my business. And so I'm happy to refer people to them. So we've now found a new title company. We've been trying out a couple of transactions. They've been really good so far. But, you know, that might change. So here in Utah, we've gone through three different title companies. We absolutely love our title company and our ourour officer that helps us there. So, yeah.

Joe: So you had a contract, you had some resources there. Did you go out and try to find buyers first or do you try to find sellers first?

Zack:  Yeah. So I'm you can build buyers and I'm one hundred percent a believer. Find buyers first. A lot of people disagree with that or say the opposite. Know since I had forty days I had to do it simultaneously. Right. And so the way I built my cash buyers list here in Utah, I networked and going to the auctions steps and I had gone to the REIA groups and I'd done whatever I could to build a couple hundred cash buyers and it was big enough that I did a couple of deals off of it. So that's one way to do it. But I had this idea when I was here to network with other wholesalers and try and trade lists and I was working with wholesaling or not wholesaling, but with one of the wholesaling owners, actually half kind of. I was an acquisition manager for him part time, and Mark Stumbler for that company was Utah sale. Now I know, I think it's Joe homebuyers now. But anyways, when I was working for them, I was like, well, would you guys trade your cash buyers list with other people if I could broker that trade? And they said yes. And so I started to take another. Sellers out to lunch and trading cash buyers lists. Now I have a couple of thousand cash buyers I four or five thousand cash buyers here in Utah. So that was my plan as soon as I landed in Florida to start trade and start networking. That's exactly what I did. By the time I got home, I have I had I still have eleven thousand cash buyers between Orlando, Tampa, south of Tampa to Bradenton, up north towards Brooksville. Yeah. So I have a huge cash buyers list just by trading cash buyers. And I was doing that while I was there.

Joe: And, you know, buyers are easy. Buyers are easy to find. Mariah versus Tampa, Florida. Yes, it is. There is not a Tampa in Utah, as far as I know. That would be weird. Tampa, Utah. And how can we reach you, Zack? We'll give you everybody's info at the end here. All right. So you already had some you had some buyers or you knew, OK, I can get buyers easily. If I got a good deal, I'm going to find the buyers. If you can't find buyers, you can at least find another wholesaler to partner with. Right.

Zack: And exactly the deal, I was thinking I was like, worst case scenario, I'll find someone that has the cash buyers list and give them a percentage of the deal.

Joe: Yeah. And you know what? There's nothing better. There's not you can find a ton of buyers just by cold calling. Right, because you'll be finding people that are actually buying houses themselves and you can find buyers by cold calling. All right. So did you go into this knowing, all right, I'm just going to do driving four dollars. Is that what you wanted to do when you came there?

Zack: One hundred percent. I believe it's the best and fastest way to build to build a list of sellers. It's the most profitable list. It's you know, when you have a tight budget, the best way to start. And honestly, I think it's the best way to scale a whole selling business to I mean, that's where we're pulling a majority of all of our revenue and still here in Utah.

Joe: OK, so what did you do? You first thing the next day you go driving for dollars?

Zack: Yeah, the very first day. I mean, that was the first thing I did when I woke up. You know, as you can see on day one is I focused on building my cash buyers list or not sorry, not building my cash buyers list, but building my marketing list, doing driving for dollars. So I got the deal machine up and just started driving through neighborhoods and I honestly didn't know where to drive. I didn't do enough prep work before I went to, like, figure out what zip codes were. You know, the way I did it is I just went to Google Maps and went to the Google image. Right. And didn't go all the way down the street level. But I zoomed down far enough where you can see, like, the nicer neighborhoods, you know, you could see the newer developments, the newer, nicer areas. I mean, like, those are not it. And I would look for the older areas, places they had like trucks parked in weird places on the grass and like garbage in old green pools, whatever I could find, you know, neighborhoods that look like there was probably older homes. And then once I did that, kind of identified those areas. Then I went to Zillow and figured out what the average price was per house within those nice neighborhoods versus those other neighborhoods. So I found in, like, the nicer neighborhoods, you know, houses were worth, according to Zillow, anywhere between three fifty to five fifty. And on the lower end areas that I could find, you know, Zillow was showing one hundred to one fifty.

Joe: All right. Looking back, would you have done that differently? Would you spend more time thinking out better zip codes to drive in?

Zack: No, I was perfect because, like, I first I was like, OK, I'm going to start with the lowest end areas first. And so the first day and a half I drove and added a couple, I don't know, four or five hundred addresses in those lower end neighborhoods. And I started cold calling.

Joe: In the first two days, four or five hundred addresses.

Zack: Yeah, I added five thousand addresses in like four weeks. Good for you. Yeah. So it was quite a few. Right. We may see that again. Yeah. Added like it was actually a little over five thousand addresses in the time I was there. So in about twenty five days.

Joe: OK, five thousand. That's driving for dollars addresses. Is that right.

Zack: Yeah that's driving four dollars addresses me driving all by myself. And I was cold calling and I put in that amount of time I was there. Let me go to my CPI's. I put those up because I put together KPI sheets. I have those numbers for you, but I dialed nine little over 90 hours as well. And I was still is running my wholesaling business.

Joe: You guys listening to this right now, you're like, oh, this doesn't work. All right? And I've tried driving for dollars. It doesn't work. How many houses have you put on to your driving? Four dollars database. Oh, how many hours have you spent cold calling. How much follow up have you done? How many offers have you made? Guys, it's not that complicated. It's a numbers game. And you want to get the results that Zack got. You got to put in the effort that Zack put in.

Zack: It was exhausting and my back hurts so bad from sitting in the car because I bought this I bought this car because I was renting a car. I like my money. Right. I feel like I'm a steward of my money. It's not my money, so I hate spending it. And so I actually bought a car about this little Ford Fusion. I bought it at the discount to sell it for profit when I got that. Did you. Yeah, but this you know, this car do so uncomfortable. I hated the seat.

Joe: You should've just rented a car.

Zack: Zack, I could have just rented a car. It would have been a lot nicer.

Joe: That you should have. All right. You've got over 5000 addresses from driving four dollars, and you made over 90 hours of cold calling, and by the way, I'm seeing the comments here. Yeah, listen to this. Scott says, I watched all the videos. Dude was tired every night. He was missing his family.

Zack: That was the hardest part, Joe. So hard to be without my family. That was so long. That was the longest I've ever been without him. Like, it's funny, I'm a big-time outdoorsman. Like, I love adventure. You know, I'll go to three days and then after two or three days of, like, my, you know, going to some paradise somewhere, I'm already just want to go home. So 30 days without my family is just brutal.

Joe: And I can see myself saying, oh, yeah, that'll be fun. I'll be easy. I can do that now. All right. So I want to get down to the technical details, nitty gritty stuff here. First day you go driving four dollars for a couple of three, four hours. You get a few hundred homes. Talk about explain. Well, everybody pretty much, I think here knows what driving for dollar as you go around looking for houses that are neglected, they need some TLC. The grass is grown. The you know, it just looks like it needs some attention. Take a picture of it. You add it to your database inside of deal machine. You don't necessarily take a picture of it. You just kind of flag it. Yeah.

Zack: So deal machine back in the day we didn't you used to use dial machine because you used to have to take a picture of the house to add it to your sheet. Right. And that took forever. It's horrible. You know, I want to be adding one hundred properties every single hour of driving. I want more than one a minute. Yeah, right. And for that to happen, I have to be going along and see like three houses within my view and just go tap, tap, tap and they're all at it. Yeah, right. I mean seconds and so deal machine since added two more features. They call it the tap to add and the pin mode. Yeah. Right. And we use tapped out. I don't even know what pin mode is to be honest, but we use tap.

Joe: Like the map follows you or something like that. You always stay in the center of it.

Zack: Yep. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So they one of the newer updates as well. One of the so like there was, there was two requirements because the machine approached me back in twenty eighteen and asked me to promote their stuff. I spoke at an event that you spoke actually in Asheville, North Carolina and I loved that's when I actually met you and I loved what you taught. I loved your lease option systems. I'd never had learned about a sandwich lease options. I had done lease options for tenants, but I had never like a signed lease options and learned that kind of amazing stuff anyway. So tangent, I love that. But at that event I met David Lesco and Josh, some of the owners of the company, and they wanted me to promote it and the two requirements was tapped out. I couldn't take pictures because it was killing the efficiency, because I've tried the I I've split tested postcards of pictures of the house and not pictures of the house. And I got a high response rates with pictures of the house. But all that meant as I got more. More sounds. But my conversions were no different. Right. And so it was just more expensive for the same amount of revenue. And it took way longer to add properties. It was very inefficient. So one of my requirements was tapped to add and the other one is I wanted a root tracking software put in. And so now they have this system where you can hit, start, drive, and if you watch the 40 day challenge, you'll see my screen where it's all highlighted in blue, all the streets that I had driven down. And I could just kind of scroll in and find what pockets I've missed or what pockets I hit. Then I was like, OK, let's I haven't hit this outskirt above a Brandon is one of the main markets I drove and so I know right where drive because I had seen it. The thing is, when you're going one hundred miles an hour and you're driving and your wife driving and your brother's driving to help you out, you know, you've got to stay organized. So. So that was so awesome. And the other part is we drive our entire market every six months.

Joe: Yeah that's huge. People don't realize that's important, but it is.

Zack: Yeah. And so the cool thing about that, the route tracking is a different time intervals, those colors change. So if you've driven it eight months ago, nine months ago to be different color than the ones you just drove, you know, it needs to be read driven again. So it's pretty awesome like that, that technology makes what I do way better because I started this way back before they had those technologies, you know, I mean, I was I was looking stuff up on county records. And I was I was using I paid a company to put together a software to put a pin on the on it was called Google Fusion Tables or whatever, to drop pins on the map of where we've already been. So we kind of know where not to drive. Very inefficient compared to what it is now.

Joe: OK, so you drive four dollars looking for houses that need some TLC. Maybe the shingles are missing junk in the yard just doesn't look like it's being taken care of. You add into the app in a day's worth of driving, you get 50 to 100 properties. Maybe then what do you do with them?

Zack: So, you know, there I was in a time crunch. I needed I couldn't send postcards, wait four or five days for them to hit the mailbox and wait a couple of days for them to call me back and then wait a couple of days to get the appointment, then go build the relationship and then go the back and forth and get the contracts. I'd be day twenty by the time I'm getting contracts. Right. And so I needed and plus it's a little more. Expensive, right? I had to use my time and not my dollar bills, and so here in Utah, my most profitable is actually postcards. I get more revenue off postcards than anything. I do make money off texting. And I know a lot of people like wingless voicemails. I haven't had a lot of luck with it, but I love cold calling. And the funny thing is cold calling is not my most profitable strategy for my list, but it's the most proactive way. It's the fastest way to Leeds. And one of the hard parts of cold calling is hiring people out to do it for you because they don't care about it as much as you like. It's there's a lot of turnover with it. I've tried these out outsourcing it to different companies outside the U.S. and it just has never been very good. But I love it. I remember the first 11 minutes I cold called Linda, answered the phone when I got the contract that day, May nine, grant first 11 minutes cold call ever. And I was like, OK, I like cold calling. Right? So when I cold call, I'm really good at it. I love it. And so I knew that when I did the 40 day challenge that that's what I was going to do. It's going to be the most, most efficient way and the fastest way to get contracts. And so that's why I chose it. But you can make money. It doesn't matter what you do, just as long as you build a decent list and reach out and see if they want to sell, you're going to get people that are telling you they want to sell.

Joe: Isn't that crazy? The postcards, they still work and they work really, really well.

Zack: They still work, you know.

Joe: All right. So you get them home. I mean, you go back. Were you in a Airbnb? Yeah. All right.

Zack: I looked at buying a house and then selling it or whatever.

Joe: You download all of these leads and you start cold calling them. What tools did you use to skip trace and what told you used to cold call?

Zack: Yep. So I use batch, batch skip tracing and you know, they're a little more expensive. I don't know if Joe has a discount code for a good price. Do you have one, Joe?

Joe: Now go and give yours.

Zack: OK, so discount code is dfd for like driving four dollars dfd you'll get like four cents off a number or something like that. Pretty good discount, but you know that's a price I pay. So there you go. OK, yep. And then so I use that for skip tracing and then I know batch. Batch has just come out, it's called Batch Dialer. They just come out and we're just testing it now and it's actually a lot cheaper than module sales. So I use Mojo while I was there, just a platform. I knew what I what we're currently using, but we're testing Batch Dialer, some of the issues that I'm currently having with Mojo, just educational for you guys. I want to add as much value as I can hear. Some of the issues that I have with Mojo is their analytics like they're like it shows how many hours you dialed. It's very inaccurate, which is really frustrating when you're trying to manage a team or when you're trying to look at your own numbers. It's kind of a pain to connect with a CRM in those kinds of things as well. It's not the best tech in my opinion, but that's what I use is MojoSales.com and but yeah, batch batch dialer has one that's like half the price now.

Joe: Yeah, very interesting. We use Mojo and we've been looking at different dealers. There's just so many good tools coming out these days. Yeah.

Zack: Tech is just it's funny how, you know, I haven't been in this business very long. You've been here much longer than me. I like how much technology advancements have we had in the space and just the last three years. Four years, you know? Yeah, it's crazy.

Joe: So you cold call. You Skip Trace maybe for each excuse me. On average, how many phone numbers would you get for each address that you got?

Zack: So I think we'd pull as many as like five or anywhere between three and seven phone numbers. But, you know, I'm just trying to get a hold of people. So I only had four numbers I'd get rid of. The worst of it would take the four best four highest quality numbers that would come with it. And that's what I would upload.

Joe: All right. And you would call them and say what?

Zack: I'd say, hey, here, let me think of my script. Hold on. Caught me off guard and say, hey, I'm not sure if I have the right number. I'm trying to get a hold of the property owner. The address is X, Y, Z. And then I'd go quiet. Right. And listen. And a lot of the times they would say, what is this regards to? And I would say, yeah, it's a little out of the blue. I was just wondering if you thought of selling or if you'd consider an offer. Right. And I like that approach more so than going, hey, is Gary available? You know, because you come across as a salesman, you're chasing Gary trying to buy his house. Right. But when you when you when you say I might have the wrong number, I'm trying to find the owner of this address. There's not a salesman in the world that has a script. And so you get a lot more like interested actually want to know what's going on. Way less hang ups, at least get it. Get your pitch out of why you're calling him.

Joe: Can you say that again? Some people in case they missed it.

Zack: Yeah. Yes. I say I'm not sure. So first of all, I just want to say this. Don't tell him what company you're with. Don't tell him what your name is. They don't care. Nobody cares. They want to know why you're calling them. Right. So just say, hey, I'm not sure if I have the right number. Right. Because you kind of already starting hesitant, right. You're not chasing. Right. You're starting hesitant. Not sure if I have the right number. I was wondering or I was not sure if I have the right number. I was wondering if you were the owner of the property X. Y is the address. Right. And then just listen. Right. They might say, what's this regards to? They might say it depends on who's asking you. And then you basically say, yeah, again, I know it's out of the blue. I was just wondering if you thought of selling or if you consider an offer, sometimes they'll say, Oh, it's my daughter. Oh, it's my brother. Oh, I don't own it. No, it's not me. Yes, I do. I don't want to sell it, but, yeah, I usually can get a lot better conversations out of people because it doesn't come across like you're selling anything. You're just trying to get a hold of the owner. And you actually know about the address. You're curious about buying it. You just seem like a normal person. It's not.

Joe: You ever tell them you're driving by and you notice you saw their house, needed some updating?

Zack: Only if they ask. Right. So I believe that salesman over sell all the time. Yeah, right. So like what that means to over sell something. Let's say let's say there's a commission commissioned sales rep at a store and someone picks up a flat screen TV and they go to pay and the salesman is going to get 50 bucks. Right. So he's all excited and he's all hyped up and he starts telling them all the cool things about the TV at checkout. And then they're like, oh, well, this TV doesn't have that. I want the one that has this. Do you guys have that one here? No, we don't. It's like, OK, I'm going to go somewhere else. They have the TV back and walk out without making the purchase. The cell was already there. I've learned that the less you say, the better off you are. For example, when they say, you know, the only time I'll tell them that I drove by, it's like, why do you want to buy my house? Right. They say something like that. So I guess I was just driving by the neighborhood and saw the house and it fit the criteria of what I was looking for. Do you have any interest in selling your property?

Zack: So what I did there is I addressed that question because every question you need to understand that comes from a seller or a potential seller is an objection. They're pulling away. Right. And so when someone asked that question or asked any question, you respond politely and to the point and immediately fire back with a question, because the person that's in control of the conversation is not the one explaining and pitching and speaking. It's the person asking the questions and directing the conversation. That's who's in control of the conversation. So if you don't immediately fire back with a question after you respond to a question, you're going to lose control of that conversation. They're going to ask you a million questions and then they're going to hang up and you're not going to know if they're interested or not. You're not going to prequalified them in any way.

Joe: Very good answer. They're interested in selling. What did you do then? Did you schedule an appointment or did you try to get a number out of them first?

Zack: More than anything, I'm trying to get the why. What's your situation? Right. So you'll so on day four, you hear me? Call Jerry where I got the three contracts, called him in the morning. And, you know, I'm talking to him about the properties. What's the condition? Trying to figure out what's going on. And I said, Jerry, they sound like they're in really good condition. You remodeled them. Why don't you just list them? You might make more money. It's my favorite question, right? I talk about their options. They have they know they're not stupid. A lot of people are afraid to ask those questions. They're like, I'm going to miss out on a deal, but I try and figure out their why. And getting to there why is way easier when you give them the options. You talk about their options. And he said, I don't care. I just want to be done. I don't care about the money. Basically, that's exactly what he said. Right when I hung up the phone on the channel or on the 40 day challenge, I said, Do you guys hear that? Right? We're trying to find someone that wants speed and convenience. We're trying to find someone that wants a pawnshop for their house. Yeah, right. We're not finding that person that wants full retail. Right. So I first start with condition and then I and then I talk about options. OK, well, why don't you just it sounds like it needs a lot of work. He inherited the property. You might make more money if you put some money into it and sell it with an agent. I don't want to deal with fixing it up. I don't want to deal with it. OK, you'd rather sell it as is in the current condition to an investor like myself? Yes, that's what I want. I go I go on the appointment. I don't care what they want. I've negotiated contracts down hundreds of thousands of dollars below what they asked because I've set expectations. I showed them comps. I've said, look, this is going to be our range might make more elsewhere, but we can have it done at this price. And they say, OK,

Joe: Yeah, I love that you're just being honest, transparent. You're a truth seeker to truth giver, right? You're giving truth and you're seeking it. Good. We need to hurry up and wrap this up. You're so if there was some desperate, I'm not desperate. But if there was motivation, you would you still kind of throw out a price just to make sure you're in the ballpark before you go on the appointment?

Zack: No, not normally. I would try and get a number out of them, but I would never give a number because I think that it puts up roadblocks and it puts up barriers. If they'll tell me a number over the phone, then I'll go with it. But if they're like, well, what's your offer say? Well, it depends largely on the condition. I'd love to get you an official offer. I don't want to say something. And have you be disappointed when the number is much lower than that. Can I meet with you and see if we can hash something out?

Joe: But if I did you ever make an offer over the phone and get a property under contract from the phone?

Zack: I always went to the house. So Jerry gave me a number for fifty five thousand a property. When I showed up, his wife was pissed. She wanted eighty thousand a property. So that's why you go on appointments, right? Because the wife wasn't going to sign. So if I had sent the contracts of fifty five, what Jerry said over the phone and her wife wouldn't, his wife wouldn't have signed. I wouldn't got the contracts now you know that deal they have my number. I would have been chasing them to the end of eternity. Right. So instead of saying one hundred percent I can do your fifty five I went and met with them in person, built a relationship with both decision makers and we ended up settling at sixty. Right. Which was still very profitable. So, yeah, very cool.

Joe: All right. So you get the contract signed in person typically then you would go.

Zack: Probably eighty percent of our contracts are signed in person. I love it.

Joe: Super simple. You're always going to close more deals when you go meet with them in person. And if you don't want to do it, then get somebody who does like Zacks done with these two acquisition managers.

Zack: And I want to be clear, you don't have to be in person. My first wholesale deal I ever did, I never met the sellers. They were out of state and gone. I had to use I don't even know how to use DocuSign back then. I was terrified. I don't know what the heck I was doing, but I made ten grand so it can be done. But I'm just saying it's it's more effective and you get bigger deals and you get more the deals and you beat out your competition when you compete with people.

Joe: Very good. All right. We got to wrap it up. I'm up against the deadline here and I'm already late. Zack, I so appreciate you being on the podcast. I think people get a lot of value out of this. Simple to take massive action, massive, imperfect action. Right. If you want the deals, you've got to put in the work. And for Zack, it was just simply getting in the car, driving four dollars and then making a lot of phone calls. Yeah, it's as simple as that, isn't it? I love it. And they can go to YouTube and find all these videos, right? Yep. What channel do they go to?

Zack: It's DFD Mastery. So you just click that on YouTube. DFD Mastery can pull it up. There's also another way you can find it on my website. Go to DFD Mastery dot com and click on social media and you can find all my social media links there.

Joe: So there I just put the links on YouTube. It's DFD. The channel is called DFDMastery. They might be able to find it. They just look up your name to Zack Booth. Right. Or if you go to DFD, that stands for Driving for Mastery Dotcom.

Zack: Cool. I hope you guys enjoy the content.

Joe: Yeah, this is really awesome. It's been super helpful. Zack, have fun in Alaska, man.

Zack: I will. I'm excited.

Joe: Going out there for ten days. Jealous? Yeah, I'm looking at it. St. Louis. It was really warm the other day. I was playing golf in the day and there are huge snowflakes right now falling in St. Louis. So hopefully you have pretty nice weather up there, even though it's going to be in the late spring. All right. We'll see you, Zack. Take care, everybody.