Joe:  Welcome. This is the Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast.

Joe:  As I was thinking of these big mistakes that investors make, I was also thinking of some of the fears, the hurdles, the uncertainties, and maybe what are the reasons why people are making these mistakes? My goal in sharing this is to get you from fear to certainty, from confusion to clarity, overwhelmed to simple ABC steps, from stuck to your first deal. So here are some of the fear I see people make. Fear of failure is one of them. This is a big one. People worry about losing money, about making a mistake. But remember, every successful investor who's done deals, houses or land, has started where you are. They didn't have any experience. They barely had any money. They didn't know what they were doing, but you know what? They said, I'mgonna figure it out anyway. And they were consistently making forward progress. They weren't worried about perfection. I like to say progress, not perfection. This is part of the learning process. This is why it's important to be in a community, like Dirt Flippers, to have a coach, to have somebody that you can go to when you need help partner with people on deals.

Another fear is a fear of the unknown. I don't know, I've never done this before, right? You don't know what to expect. It can be daunting, but with research, with guidance, you can navigate that process confidently. So you want to be careful who you're getting your advice from. You wanna make sure you're listening to people who have been there, done that, who have that t-shirt, who've done deals like this, and you can do what they're doing. All you're doing is not reinventing the wheel. You're just copying what they are doing.

Another big fear is the fear of rejection, right? Nobody likes being told no. No can be discouraging, but it's just part of the game. It's just a part of making offers. Don't take it personally. You're gonna get a lot more no’s than you are yeses, but every single yes, you're gonna get is gonna be five, $10,000. How many of you will be okay with getting 50 no’s to get one yes and making five grand? Would that be all right with you? Yeah. Don't be afraid of the rejection. We're not in this business to make friends. If you want a friend, go get a dog. I got three of them. I've got lots of friends. If you want friends, get a do, if you wanna make money, make offers. Get okay with no. Get used to no. In fact, I might even say if you've not gotten somebody mad at you by 12 o'clock, you're not making enough offers. You're not marketing hard enough. I don't know what to say, just get over it. What's the worst that can happen? They say no, they yell at you, that's it. Not a big deal. It's just part of the game. I remember when I was first training my sons is to do land deals. I warned them in advance. You're going to get a lot of angry voicemails, okay? Don't even worry about listening to the whole thing. Just delete it, close it, mark it as dead, move on. At first, I'm so glad I warned about that because they were getting some nasty voicemail. And these are my 14-year-old boys, right? Like fear of rejection, it's okay. Everything's going to be all right. No is good because it means you're one more no closer to a yes, to doing a deal.

Another fear that people have, this is a good fear, a fear of legal issues. You're concerned about the contracts, the legalities, that can all be intimidating. So it's important to educate yourself and seek professional advice when needed. Now, good news, I just talked to one of my real estate attorneys yesterday. We were talking and I was asking him like, hey, would you be all right with doing maybe once a week for an hour answering people's questions? I'm like, yeah, I'd be fine. I was like, well, are you serious? He said, yeah. Let's do it. You have to be in dirt flippers, but would you be interested in open office hours with my personal real estate attorney where you can ask him any question you want. Ask him questions about the legalities of wholesaling. They're like, you know, how do LLCs work? How to trust? He does a lot of things with trusts. Maybe you have some questions on the legalities of cold calling and texting and all of that stuff. So hopefully in the next week to two weeks, we're gonna get that on the schedule inside of dirt flipper. I'm excited about that. So it's important to educate yourself and seek professional advice when needed.

Another fear I want to talk about here is the fear of not being able to sell a deal. This is important, right? You don't want to be stuck with a bad deal. And if you're worried about that, that can stop you from marketing, from talking to sellers and making offers because what if they say yes to my offer and it's a bad deal? I get it. This is why it's so important to do it the way we do it. We make an offer. We have 90 days to close. And guess what? You can cancel for any reason during the 90 days. It's not a big deal. And it happens. I'd say maybe 15 to 20% of the time on our deals, we make a bad offer. Let me realize, you should know within one or two or three weeks, four at the most. You've got three months, but you should within four weeks, whether you have a good deal or not. And you go back to the seller and blame it on me. Blame it on your investors, your partners. Say, hey, listen, sorry, we've been looking into this deal. And I've called the county; I've called a bunch of realtors. I've talked to my investors and the numbers are just not going to work. The numbers aren't going to work. So we either need to renegotiate a new price on this deal or cancel the agreement. I'm really sorry. What do you want to do? What would you rather do? That's it. And if you have to cancel it, I have in the course, a termination letter, you send that to them, you lower the price with the right price. You can sell anything. There's a pig for every barn. So you can find a buyer at the right. Sometimes I'll tell a seller, listen, this isn't going to work. There's no way I can pay you 30,000 for this property, right? But if it's a marginal deal, I might say, I'm not going to pay you 30, but I might be able to find somebody else who can pay 30.

Another fear or hurdle that I see people have is like, okay, what if seller says, yes, I don't have enough money to buy the deal. I don't have enough money for earnest money deposits. I do not have enough money to pay the realtor of commissions. I do not know how this all works. I have no money. A couple of things on that. You do not need a lot of cash to get started. If you wanted to buy a deal, you do not have to use your own money. Did you know that? You can use private investors money, like mine. You can use other private investors, find your own. You can credit cards to buy these deals. You can use hard money loans, land funding companies. There's at least 20 funding companies I have inside of Dirt Flippers that you could use to fund your land deals, okay? You just need to know where the money is. And I like to say it like this, you should dig your well before you're thirsty. You need to know, all right, well, all, right, if I get this deal accepted, I'm all right. Because if it's a good deal, I know I can borrow it from Uncle Joe. I know I can find somebody else inside the Dirt Flippers community that will lend money on the deal and partner with me on it. I know that I could do a double close and use Uncle Joe's free transactional funding Uncle Joe. Should I start calling myself Uncle Joe? That's weird. I've never done that before. But you know what? We have free transactional funding in the course that doesn't cost you anything. Transactional funding is where you just need money for one day. You close on it and you sell it the same day. A lot of times when you are selling or wholesaling a deal to a home builder, they will not touch assignments. So you need to close on and then turn and sell it the same. Not a big deal. We'll hook you up. We have free transactional funding inside of Dirt Flippers. So do not worry about where the money is coming from. And guess what else? You can buy land deals directly from the sellers with creative financing. What if you offered them, here's a cash offer and here's a little higher owner financing offer. In fact, I can't get you that number, but if I could get you something closer to that, Mr. Seller, would you consider seller financing? Would you consider maybe getting some payments over time? I can pay you cash. I can close in 30 days at this price, but if you would take more, I might be able to get you more if you consider payments over the time. Let's say it's worth $100,000 in property, simple round number. Give them an offer for $50,000 cash. And by the way, if it's worth a hundred and they'll take your $50 thousand, I will lend you that money all day long on that deal. And there's a hundred other people inside of Dirt Flippers that will as well. Sothe money is never a problem on a really good deal. Okay, so Mr. Seller, I can pay you 50 grand cash because it's a worth a 100. I'll pay you a 50 grand in cash or I'll give you 75 grand with owner finance. Zero downmaybe, 500 down, I don't know. And principal only payments over 10 years. All day long. The cool thing about offering owner financing to the sellers is now instead of having just one thing to negotiate, the price, you can negotiate the price. The down payment, the interest rate, the monthly payment amount, the term of the loan, like how long do you make the payments, interest only, principal only payments, even when the payments start. So there's like five or six things you can negotiate when you offer owner financing. Here's the deal. I want to just tell you, stop worrying about the money. The money will come if it's a good deal. And if it's not, you've got time to back out of the deal. I'm hoping that this is helping some of you guys feel like, oh, man, I can do this, okay?

That's my whole goal of this. I want you to think, yeah, I could do this. All these fears and objections and mistakes, these are just things in my head. I don't need to worry about them anymore. Who's afraid of competition? I see this a lot. You have this fear that the market is oversaturated and it's too competitive. But you got to understand something here. This is the dumbest thing to be afraid of. You know why? Because competition is a good thing, number one. And when you look at vacant land and compare it to houses, it doesn't even compare. In some markets, yeah, they may be, quote unquote, more competitive, but that just means there's more opportunity to be made there. That's how I look at it. It's easier to get offers accepted, and it's easier to sell your deals in these markets because there's a lot of activity going on, okay? And you don't have to necessarily be buying the properties at 50 cents on the dollar. Maybe you could offer 60, 70 cents on the dollar, offer a little bit more than everybody else. But if you want to stand out in a, quote, unquote, competitive market, just these things I've been talking about. Consistent marketing, talk to sellers, make offers, written offers to every seller in the mail, and follow up every 30 days. If you just do those three or four things, you will stand out head and shoulders above all your competition in the quote-unquote competitive market.

So the land market is not saturated. You might feel you're late to the game. Listen, I heard people telling me that they were late to game when I got started five years ago. Everybody's always complaining about competition, too many sellers, not enough too many buyers, not enough buyers. I remember one time I had two students, clients in my program, that were going into the same market. One of them said, there's too many sellers, not Enough buyers. I can't sell anything. It's easy finding sellers. I can find any buyers. A day later, somebody called me and said, I've got tons of buyers. I can’t find any sellers. This doesn't work. They were saying the exact opposite thing in the same Market. You know what I did? I said, you guys need to talk to each other. And I gave them each other's names and numbers. You guys got to talk to each other because you've got an easy problem to fix. Someone has a bunch of sellers and somebody has a lot of buyers. You guys need to be doing deals together. Don't listen to the naysayers at saying, oh, it's hard, it competitive. Fine, go ahead and do something else. Go trade cryptocurrency, go trade things on, sell things on eBay. Go join some MLM. You're right. Land investing doesn't work. Go away. Do something else, don't listen to the Naysayors of people that are complaining because there is a lot of opportunity in land. Listen, 85% of the United States is vacant land. You look at a map and you look at how much area of the United States, is city, urban, rural, you know, it's like just 15%. Like the New England area of the United states, the rest is vacant land. Sure, a lot of it is farmland, agriculture, military, whatever. But there is a lot of land. There are over 3,000 counties in the United States. There is so much opportunity out there. So you're not late to the game. And in fact, what we're seeing right now is a huge increase in response rates on direct mail over the last six to 12 months. Like we're getting almost double the response rates that we were getting a year ago in markets right now for land. Why is that? I don't know. I think people have stopped doing direct mail. They're doing more texting. A lot of people have quit and are doing something else. The whole thing after COVID, a lot of, you know, YouTube university took off and there were a lot of YouTube university wholesalers out there that quit, they've given up or doing something else? I don't know. Not a lot of people know about land yet. Maybe more people know about land than they did 10 years ago. But when you compare it to how many people are doing houses now, how many people are doing land, we're seeing 3%, 5% response rates on some of our direct mail right now. In some markets, like in Michigan, we are seeing 10% response rates. If there's competition, it's completely irrelevant.

The other big thing I see, and I see this a lot and I want to help you with this, the lack of confidence when you're making offers. You making offers can be Intimidating especially if you know, but it's just a numbers game and you know what the more offers you make the better You're gonna get at making offers and the more likely you are to get one accepted So don't be afraid to put yourself out there. You might have this fear of I'm gonna look stupid You might have a fear of success. What if they say? Yes, this lack of confidence can be crippling but guess what? It's not a big deal. It really is it now. I remember when I was first getting started. I was intimidated that I didn't want to talk to sellers. So I just would send an offer before even talking to them. And then when I was doing deals with my boys, I didn't want to train my boys on how to talk to sellers, I just told them, listen, the voicemail comes in, look the property up, I showed them how to go to Zillow, how to get comps, put it in this spreadsheet calculator thing that I have, and just send an offering. And we will only talk to the sellers after they get your offer. And guess what? We were averaging at that point; one out of every 30 offers would be a deal. And, we didn't talk to those sellers until after they got our We send a postcard, hey, do you want an offer, call this 24-hour recorded voicemail. They call the voicemails, they either leave a message, or they send us a text with the reference ID on the postcard. We look it up, we send them an offer, and we send the same offer every 30 days and we email them and we text them and even do ringless voicemails. Hey, did you get the offer? Call me back. Boom. Now that we don't have that fear, we have more confidence, we know what we're doing, we actually talk to them a little bit for three, four minutes before we make the offers and we do deals, we get them accepted.

So, here's the point. I want you guys to have confidence. How do you do that? I want to know that you've got me, I got your back. If you make a bad offer, it's okay. You can blame it on me, blame it on the investors, blame on the people that you're the realtors, blame it on the county, blame it on numbers and we'll look at the deal, we'll comp it for you, we'll tell you, yeah, you know what, I'm not gonna partner with you on that at that price, but if you brought it at this price, we would partner with you. Bam, let's go, right? I'm lending money to this week or early next week to a guy who's in our apprentice program on a really good deal. It's worth about 20 grand. He's buying it for five. This is such a good smoking hot deal. He's got the money, but he doesn't have the confidence yet. All right. So great. No problem. I'll lend you the money. You can borrow my confidence. So I want you guys to think. This is important to understand. I want guys to feel like you've got a million dollars right now burning a hole in your pocket. You're looking for deals. Tell yourself, I got a $1,000,000 right now, burning a whole and hit pocket national bank, looking for deals. So when you're talking to sellers, when you are talking to realtors, when you make an offer, it's like, you don't have to sell anything. You're looking for deals. They need to sell you on why you should buy their property. Why should you make an offer on their property and not on one of the other hundreds that are available right now? That will give you some confidence.

Does that make sense? Is that helpful there? You understand? Like, borrow my confidence. Borrow other people in the Dirt Flippers community's confidence. If you make offers, you will do deals. You will get them accepted. I have so many stories to tell you, hundreds if not thousands of students that have gone through my land program are doing deals because they just consistently put in the work. They were focusing on the momentum. They were focusing on the right things, the marketing, talking to sellers, making offers and following up and that's all they did. They made a hundred offers. They didn't care about rejection. They didn't care about no. They made few mistakes, but they did not let them slow it down and they eventually did a deal. Three grand, five grand, ten grand, I've had students that made just a thousand dollars on a deal before. But you know what? It was a first shut up check. They had that shut up check and they shoved it in everybody's face that didn't believe in them and said, here you go, shut up. And they turned around and started growing and doing deals. I've made thousands of offers, all right? I know what it takes to do deals. So borrow my confidence. I know this works. It's a numbers game. It's not a talent game. Write that one down.