Hey, before we started the show, I wanted to give you some cool news, a chance that you may have to appear on the bigger pocket's podcast on a bonus. Ask me anything episode. Really? So here's the deal. You know, we think bigger pockets. We think real estate investing is amazing. It's like the best thing since sliced bread.

I don't know who came up with that phrase, but it's awesome. Right. And I've heard from thousands of people who tell me that has changed their lives for the better, just like it's changed mine.

Now, if you agree with that, I've got a really easy way for you to share the good news of the bigger pockets real estate podcast with people in your network. And you might just win a chance to be on this show. So here's how to do it. Go to bigger pockets. Dotcom's I share that's bigger pockets. Dotcom slash a r e. You're going to need a link there that you can share with people, you know, and if ten of those people check out the show, then you are entered in for a chance to appear right here with me and David on a bonus Q&A episode of the Bigger Pockets podcast.

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Well, thank you and enjoy the show.

This is the Bigger Pocket's podcast show for eighteen, because if you could find a great deal, it's amazing to partner up with someone. And that's where you hear people say, hey, you can do real estate without none of your own money, because if you are good at finding deals, then you don't need the money. Just go out there and find good deals.

You're listening to bigger pockets. Radio simplifying real estate for investors, large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing without all the hype, you're in the right place. Stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from bigger pockets. Dotcom, your home for real estate, investing online.

What's going on of what? It's Brenda Turner, host of the Bigger Pockets podcast here in the C Shed on Maui, Hawaii, with our guests today. But we'll bring him in in just a second. And also with my co-host, Mr. David Greene. David Greene, I miss you, buddy. I wish you're out here in Hawaii. You got to come out and see me.

We need to make it happen. I think the quarantine laws have relaxed a little bit. As long as you get tested before you fly to Hawaii, you're good. Yeah, exactly.

I got a test within 72 hours before coming here. And then you can get here. You can you can hang out and see all the fun of Maui.

So I was actually just at the beach this weekend with my mom. We I rented an Airbnb and we had the family come out for her sixtieth birthday. And I was thinking while I was there, once you've been to a Hawaiian beach, no other beaches will get you going anymore.

That's funny, man. Yeah.

OK, so honest question. Not a question. Who's more fun at the beach? Your mom or me?

Don't answer that. No, that's the Today Show. Like I said, we actually have our guest in the studio today out the sea shed out here in Hawaii. Our guest is Alex Camacho, who's a good buddy of mine who I've known for a little while now, a couple of years now. And this has been crushing at the last year. So today he goes into his full story of how he went from kind of a rough point where he, like, lost a lot during the last recession.

He lost his career. He switched that over to real estate, how he used The Apprentice model to be a really successful real estate investor. Today you're going to learn how he did that, the skills he learned. And then what you're going to love about today's show is Alex goes in like detail about like how he's finding deals, how he's like doing everything he's doing, what the skill sets he has and that he's grown over the last few years, what skill sets he's used to benefit today.

This show, like David said at the end, I'm going to repeat it now, might be one of the most impactful shows for people trying to get into real estate is they're going to learn how it's done from somebody who just went through the seven year journey to get there. You're going to love it. It's an amazing show. But before we get there, oh, by the way, make sure you listen all the way through to the to the deep, deep dive, because he talks about this deep, deep dive he did where it was basically like an office slash house hack office slash house hack slash vacation rental hack, all combine long term flip slash.

Amazing deal that made him a ton of money. You're going to love it. And it's cool strategy that more people could be utilizing that they're not. So stay tuned for that later.

But before we get to that, let's get to today's quick tip. Mightiness, quick tip.

Simple. I was actually talking with our guest. We were surfing a couple of days ago and I was talking to him actually when we were out in the water. We ran into another guy out there who is also his name's Josh Arthur Josh, who's actually a bigger pocket listener. And he was like, dude, I listen to your podcast. And we were chatting with Josh for a while. But then I mentioned he said, hey, are you going to do it?

Any local meet ups here in Maui? And I said, I'll probably just make sure you have your keyboard alert set. And I realize, like, I don't say that enough. We even said in a while. So I'm going to remind everybody Bigger Pockets has keyword alerts. You can go put a keyword like a word like Maui in there. Don't do that one unless you live here or Nashville or Denver or whatever city you live in. And then any time that word is mentioned in the bigger pocket's forums, including our event system, where people host events, you get notified, you get an email or even a text message if you're a member.

So why is that beneficial? Because when people are doing things in your area, you want to be in the knowledge about it. You want to be knowledgeable, you want to be there. If that's an event, you want to start connecting with those people. So your quick tip is good. A bigger pocket dot com slash alerts elite artists and make sure you have a keyword alerts set for the terms and the locations that you want to be notified about.

And guess what? It's free if you have a Brager pocket's membership. So that's a free membership. So go do it right. Go do it. And that's today's quick tip. All right. Moving on, let's get to today's show sponsors.

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Oh all righty then. I think it's time for us to get the Today Show. Anything you want to add. David, share this one, please. This is a really good episode. So if I had to pick one episode on BP that someone who says, hey, I want to become a full time real estate investor, what do I need to do to get there? It would be this one. Yeah. Yeah, totally agreed.

And also make sure you listen for David's new nickname.

Your nickname game is stepping it. Brandon. Is that it is. It is. All right. So stay tuned for that at the end of the show.

And without further ado, let's bring in Alex Camacho. Alex, welcome to the bigger podcast podcast in the Sea Shed. How are you doing, man? Amazing. Especially that I'm here in Maui. They're having me. I'm so honored. Yeah, well, this should be fun today, so I'm pumped to talk with you today about your, I guess, your journey, where you've been, where you're going to. And I obviously know a little bit about it the fact that you just landed here in Maui, you know, you're here for the winter, maybe who knows how long.

It's exciting. So we grabbed you to be in the sea shed today. But I actually don't know a lot about you're like early on stuff. I guess I want to know, like, walk us through your journey. How did you even get into the real estate in the real estate game?

Well, I actually got into banking first, so I was very fortunate to get into banking right out of high school. My older brother was working at Washington Mutual, the bank that I was bought by Chase. And so I started as a bank teller, learned the financial field, so to speak, and really fell in love because nobody in my family had ever been in anything like that. So I was in banking. I thought I was going be a banker for actually my whole life.

But then I got the opportunity to go with the mortgage business. So I was working for banking for five years and then I went to the mortgage business before it crashed and did really well there. But then I didn't have any money management skills and then the market crashed. I lost it all. And it's been a slow climb back up through real estate, become an agent, some property management did some short term rentals, Airbnb stuff. And now I've been full time real estate investing now on that side of things for about four years.

I'm very cool. So you if I remember right, you started like early on when you got into real estate, you ended up working for somebody else to begin with. That writer. You were like a something called collieries. I'm like that, right? Yes. Yes, I go. So I worked for a real estate investor, very successful one in Southern California for a year. And then I end up working for another successful real estate investment firm, a much.

Figure one for another year and a half before I went out on my own, because I really want to know what I was doing. Yeah.

So this is what I want to I want to spend a little time on this, because this is such a cool strategy that most people skip over. It's almost like the apprentice stage, right? Like where you're you're learning how David and I talk a lot about this, just like this apprentice stage where you're learning from somebody hopefully making some money at the same time, but rather than trying to figure it all out on your own. So first of all, let's walk through.

How did you even get that gig? Like, well, like you answer of ad in the newspaper, like, where did that come from? Great question. Well, what happened was that when I was a real estate agent after the recession, I was doing a lot of short sales. So that's kind of where I got the real estate investment bug. I saw that the investors I was getting these short sales approved for were making like a hundred thousand dollars a deal.

And that just sparked my interest. But I didn't take action for about three years or so because, you know, life and that was just not taking action. And then what happened was once I had built up this Airbnb income, it was somewhat passive, but I didn't own the properties. So I saw an opportunity for me to jump into real estate investing, which I had already been thinking about for years, but had, you know, about four or five thousand income coming from the Airbnb properties.

So I went ahead and looked on Craigslist and just basically found a real estate investor looking for somebody, a salesperson, an inside salesperson, I say. Right. And just basically apply for the job. And, you know, he like my experience. Obviously, I had banking, I had mortgage, I had real estate agent experience. So I had a lot of experience. And it was a real I would call downgrade because I had I mean, I was getting paid a lot less when I'm normally getting paid.

But I wanted to be in the game. I want to learn from somebody that was doing exactly what I wanted to do. And I mean, I really learned that from bigger pockets. But you guys talking about so much because I understood that, hey, I need to be around. Somebody is actually doing this business and I just read some books, not just go and watch some podcasts or anything like that. I need to actually be in the game with somebody.

And so that's what I did. And I want to go work for him for about a year until I went to the other company.

Yeah, yeah.

This is probably like the perfect Cinderella story of everything that we tell people. This is how you do it. First off, you started off by doing a little bit of everything. That is something we Brandon and I had a long talk about this on a romantic walk on the beach one day.

And he was saying, you know, I think you got to start off because we were talking about how you have to say no to to more things in life when you're good. But in the beginning, you had to say, yes, you should start off saying yes to everything. You're young, say yes, learn as much as you can get exposed to as much as you can see where you enjoy it, where you fit in. And then once you find that niche that you know is your thing, then you start saying no.

And it sounds like that's exactly what you did. I love that. The second piece was that you took the apprenticeship route. You said I want to build big wealth with real estate, but I'm not ignorant enough to think I could do this on my own, that there actually is a method to the madness. And if I go work for somebody else, I can learn what they're doing. I can help make that person money. They will help give me education.

That will help make me money. Was that something you planned on doing or is this just kind of how the situation unfolded as you took each little step?

Actually, I planned it because I did read that book, Mastery by Robert Green, and there was a great, great chapter in there called The Apprenticeship Phase, where we're basically talking about. So that helped me understand, like what I had to do. You know, it really gave me like a roadmap, like, hey, this is your apprenticeship apprenticeship phase. And I made a commitment, honestly, because I had failed before in real estate. I've given a ten years like, hey, I'm going to invest ten years of my life in real estate investing because I know if I put in that decade, by the time that ten years is done, I'll be fine.

And so it would help me with the daily struggles and help me with making this a huge amount of money. And I'm making very little swallowing my ego on a regular basis. Yeah. So I did kind of plan it that way, but I did get to a point where I knew that, hey, I've kind of plateaued with him and that's where somebody actually reached out to me and they recruited me to go work for a much larger company with an equity stake in the deals and much more of a formal role and something where I could continue growing in just that next phase of the apprenticeship phase, so to speak.

So how did that the first one.

So you did they like the Airbnb arbitrages? You got some money coming through, right. Can you give make a real quick how did that strategy work? Like, what was that then? We'll go on back to The Apprentice thing. Sure. So we were renting apartments in Hollywood where there's a lot of tourists, a lot of people coming in. This was like two thousand fourteen fifteen. Airbnb hadn't really been heavily regulated yet. So we would basically get an arrangement going with the apartment managers where they would get some of the income.

So we'd offer them to three hundred dollars and then they would allow us to do full time Airbnb on those. So we, you know, we do the Airbnb. We I mean, we put furniture in there, we pay our rent every month. We pay. We had a system with the cleaning ladies, so we really put that together and then eventually end up being where we had about ten of those. It was when my brother and I and.

We were splitting the income on that, but wasn't that what you had on the system, you didn't really have that much actual work to do on each unit. So that allowed me to have that income coming in and go work for the first guy. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I like that strategy a lot and it still works. I know people who still do it today, but like you said, it was it was kind of Wild West back there.

And so there weren't a lot of laws against it today. There's a ton of like legislation. You got to do this. You got it. But there are still areas and there are still people who you find ways to get it done. And we've had multiple people on the show talk about that strategy over the years. So also just to bring back some we talked about a minute ago, Robert Green book Mastery. So for those who are interested, we did have Robert Green on the show.

It was episode three 15. It's a bigger pockets that comes out show three one five where he talked about that concept of The Apprentice and its apprenticeship in The Master. So go back and listen to that. And I'm actually working through Master right now. I read it quickly that kind of like a real quick read before we had him on the show, just trying to get through it. But I like to do that before we have big authors. But I'm going to go like deep dive one chapter at a time right now, underlining stuff that zuway very, very good book.

So let's go back then to that world of you got this this gig working for the one investor, like basically being an inside salesperson and then the other investor. How did those two, like, structure? What was the how did you make money on either one of those? What was that like and what was the difference between the two? Sure. So the first guy I was inside, sales agent, essentially, I was a glorified telemarketer. I was in there just pounding the phone six, seven hours a day, also doing some doorknocking.

I was getting paid a small salary. I think it was like three thousand dollars a month. And then I was getting a flat fee per deal that we actually acquired when we acquired it because he didn't really wholesale he was just all about flipping and he would keep all those small multifamily things that fit more of an income property. So I would get twenty five hundred dollars. So but his buying criteria was that he wanted to make a deep discount. It was all about the discount with him.

If he didn't make one hundred thousand dollars profit on the deal, he didn't even want to touch it. So it was really difficult to get him deals. But I was after the first deal, I got him about three months in. Every month after that, I was getting on average, about one. That's cool. That's very cool. So why the transition then? Why did you transition from that to going off on your own? Well, a great question, I always that was always the goal, right?

I want to be a full time real estate investor flipping houses full time, because I did love his blueprint, the first guy I worked for. But then I going to go work for that second company after a year and that company, I thought they were different. They were like a flip factory. They're flipping over 200 houses a year annually in Southern California and they had more systems in place. They had a lot more employees. So I got to see their operation from the inside.

And at that, when I wouldn't go work for the second company that year and a half, I got them fifty four properties and my best month I got them eight deals. So I saw volume deals in one month and one month we closed on eight deals that I brought in.

Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah. So during that year and a half I just, I saw a lot and I learned a lot and I saved money because I was making more. And so right towards the end I just felt that hey, I've learned enough. I built the relationships, I got the knowledge, I've got enough money to flip about two houses on my own in Southern California. And that's when I left on good terms and I went on my own.

That's cool.

So this is actually when you walked into my life then because you came, you would just start on your own. This is like, what, a year and a half ago? Maybe about six months ago. OK, yeah. So right. So you you went on your own and then you took a vacation and you came to Maui. I think you had done a couple maybe before that, but like you were just like four or five on my own.

OK, yeah. Joint venture partners and things like that. Yeah. Yeah it was definitely I want to get to today's idea because I know you use a lot of joint venture stuff, so I want to get on that. So you you took a trip to Maui and you hit me up and said, hey, I'm going to Maui. And you wanted to know. I think you want to know where I go to church. Right. So you met me and you actually showed up.

We ended up talking for a while and then you ended up joining us for that Maui mastermind event that we had that Tal Yarber and I put on. And like you were such an amazing person to have it, that at that mastermind, I'm like you you you were the last person to join.

It had one more spot available. And we were like, well, we just won't have somebody that you came in the last second. But just having you there, you just have like the spirit, the spunk that like everyone was like, oh, man, I love Alex. So first of all, thank you for coming. That you made that trip so much better, that whole experience. But then you got around basically 18 other people who were all like, you know, high top, high level, top investors.

I'm curious, like how that played into, like, everything else that came after that. We want to talk about did you like I'm not asking you to give me a hey, that Brannon's event was great, but I'm sort of like just getting around those people. How did that play into your future success? Oh, it was game changer. It was a game changer because I was already headed in a positive direction. I was already a huge fan of bigger pockets.

I'd listen probably two hundred episodes at that point. So it was an honor to meet you in person. And and then it was such a blessing because it's like, oh, wow. Like I'm going to get to come back to Hawaii. And so it was short notice. But yeah, I came back and then my mind was so expanded by being around all these other guys, all these other gals to and basically what they did for me is it helped me to just look at, you know, a much bigger picture than what I was already thinking.

I was thinking, hey, I'm going to go and do my own thing. I'm going to flip, you know, say house a month and just kind of live a good life. But I didn't really have an overall plan. But in that mastermind, a big theme of the mastermind was clarity. Like, what exactly do you want your life to look like? What exactly you want your business to look like? Yeah, and it wasn't like a typical real estate seminar, right, where you're just going there, you're getting knowledge and speakers are on stage and they're giving you information.

It was group huddles. We also did amazing events together. We've got to build these bonds.

And I like to say I was the dumbest guy in the room and I'm proud of it because I think I played that role because they were such smart individuals there. And I got to also see their problems, which were much larger than my problems. And so, you know, that was huge. And also they were all like friends, colleagues and mentors almost at the same time throughout this journey where I've been able to call them, lean on them, ask them questions, ask them advice, follow them on social media, continue to get inspiration to say, hey, that person, I know that person and they're killing it.

I mean, I'm so lucky to have this person in my network. So network is huge because, you know, has accountability factor and inspiration and all that and one. So it was an amazing event. So thank you so much for allowing me to attend now. Thanks for coming. Alex, would you say that being exposed to people with bigger problems than yours changed how you looked at your own problems and in essence made them seem like they were easier than you were probably thinking before that?

Absolutely. I specifically remember AJ Osborn saying something about him having to buy another jet. And I remember it was like, OK, I don't have problems like that, but I'd like to have problems like that. Huh. Oh, wow. So, yeah, that when you're exposed to other people, there are living lives like that, you're just like, OK, well, you know what? My problems aren't that big and I need to have a problem.

And the value in realizing your problems aren't as big as you thought is not just so you could say, well, that person is more important. It's because now doing the work that it takes to be successful doesn't feel as hard. I got all I got to do is jump on the phone and call twenty five people today before this conversation that felt like ridiculously hard. I'm not up to it. I don't think I could do it. Then you hear someone who's talking about being sued or trying to manage 20 flips in a month or something and you're like, yeah, I'm kind of lucky that all I got to do is make twenty five calls.

I feel like that's something that I've really enjoyed about getting around more successful people is that you get perspective and then the load feels lighter, at least to me it does when I see what someone else is doing. And you know, I'm frustrated with an employee on my team and I hear someone talk about 20 people just quit their team and they got to go fill 20 positions. It doesn't seem nearly as bad. I'm really curious to hear. And we kind of skipped over it a little bit.

So I want to take us back just a little. When you left the employer that you had, you had built up some skills working for them that helped you put eight people in contract in a month. Obviously, that is a very important skill to have in real estate investing, because as we say all the time, it's the ability to get the deal that's the most valuable. Would you mind helping the listeners understand the value that you place on the skill of talking to sellers and getting them to agree to put their house in contract or noticing maybe who's motivated and who's not and how that skill served you when you said, OK, now I'm going to go start my own thing?

Oh, absolutely. I resonate the most with the acquisition side of real estate investing because selling, negotiating, presenting are some of my best skills. So they were used a lot. So I found I feel like I found a role that I could use what I do best the majority of the day. And that was just getting after making offers, talking to sellers, but being able to talk to agents, being able to talk to wholesalers, being able to talk to sellers is one of the most important skills as an investor, because these are the opportunities that are coming to you and you need to be able to influence these people to consider your offer and to give you to get some engagement there.

And so it's a huge skill. And I mean, maybe not everybody is going to be in sales or in acquisitions, but then you need to have someone on your team that is great at that because then you're not going to get a consistent deal flow. And that's what we look for. It's not just one great deal. We want I want to get consistent great deals.

So let me ask you, if you started off again and you didn't work for someone else, you take yourself on your first day. I'm going to go work for this real estate investor. But you started your own business. You ascribe to that whole I'm not going to go make someone else money. I'm going to make me money. How do you see your ability to build wealth or put people under contract being affected if you had not had that training and experience working in someone else's company?

Oh, wow. That's a that's a tough one. I think I would have struggled. I think I might have quit. I think I might have bought a bad deal or maybe not got as many deals because I didn't have the financial backing. I didn't have all the knowledge and everything else I needed to execute all these deals. So I just I don't I can't even think about I think it would have been very difficult.

Yeah. Yeah. Then yeah, I, I love all this stuff. And I want to stress this point that you made about deal flow. Right. It's not about so many new investors getting in this game. And in the beginning. Yeah, you just want to get a deal. Everyone wants to get a deal. They might get their first deal. But you're like, it's not about the deal. But if you want to have a business, it's like, imagine you owning a McDonald's, right?

And like you're like, we got to sell a hamburger, you guys. We got to sell a ham. And you go outside, you're like, would you want to buy a hamburger? Come in here and then you get your hamburger. You're like, we did it. We got a hamburger like and then you're like, OK, crap. Now we can't pay our bills. And that's how so many people approach real estate. And so I did that for years.

I lived in very like, go get a deal and then I go get the deal and then I'd stop all my deal getting activities. And then I would go and now I got to rehab that deal. And then I go, we have a deal. Then I got to sell that deal if I'm going to flip it right or refinance at or rent rented or whatever I'm going to do, I got to operate the deal and then I'm out. And then I'm like, OK, take a deep breath.

Oh, shoot, I got to go get another hamburger, right?

And then I go out there and I do it again.

Right. And so what you mentioned was like, deal flow. What you want is not a deal. You want deal flow. So can you explain like what does that mean to those who are listening? Say, how do I build deal flow? Like how do you how did you and how do you build deal flow? What's your like kind of techniques there?

Well, you need to have a system, a system for analyzing deals, a system for making offers consistently, because I found that if you don't have those in. You're just going to kind of flying by the seat of your pants every single day, my number one goal is to make one solid offer and that could be an off market deal. That could be an MLS deal. But I've broken it down to that kind of single goal because I found that if I get overwhelmed, I've got to make five offers this day.

So it's more about having a consistent deal flow. And to do that, you need to be making offers consistently and to make offers consistently. You need to be analyzing deals consistently. So I just found that a lot of people are stuck in their head or in this theory they understand real estate kind of the theory of it, but they're not applying that knowledge and seeing that engagement that happens when you're making offers every single day and getting in the game.

Too many people are sitting on the sidelines because they just overthinking it. But it's not that difficult the more deals you analyze. Also, I I'm a big fan of of the way you talk about that, of just analyzing 100 deals. I think you talked a lot about that. Right. And at this point, I think I've calculated I've analyzed probably five thousand deals over the last four. So good four years. But I haven't bought five thousand properties, you know.

But it's one of those things you analyze that many just get this, like, spider sense. You just can see a good deal. And I think that's one of my strengths. Now, I could spot a good deal kind of a mile away now, like I sometimes just got drop. Whatever you're doing, because you've seen so many deals, you're like, oh, this one has potential. And then a lot of what we do is we're disqualified.

We're just getting rid of deals. This is not a deal. That's not the deal. This one looks like it might have some it's not a deal. This not. And then you finally find that one and then you're all over that, the whole deal because it warrants that much attention. So that's yeah.

That is a great segue into my next question for you. And this is why we're interviewing you, because it's very hard to find somebody who is I mean, a lot of people will say where they get deals. I find them here. I find them there. The problem is, if you're the listener, once you find the deal, you don't know what to do with it or you don't know how to tell if it's a deal. And I can tell Alex, because you worked for someone else, you got so many at bats.

When that pitch comes out of the pitcher's hand, you know, that's going to be a strike. That's going to be a ball. This is a curveball. And you know how to adjust your approach based on the type of seller you have. So I want to see if we can pull some of that out of you. Can you give us some practical advice regarding what you look for when you think you've got a deal, how you would know if it's not a deal, maybe?

What are some of the things you do to disqualify people? And then once we know what a deal looks like, I'll ask you some follow up questions about how you would analyze it.

Sure, sure. Well, I think no one with it's off market, I would say, like having a true motivation. So being able to spot out real pain, I know that sounds bad, but it's basically if you you use empathy when you're a lot when you're dealing with sellers or. I do, because it helps you put yourself in their situation. So if you're dealing with a hoarder, if you're dealing with somebody that's in foreclosure, if there's a high level of pain and they have real intentions to sell the property, that's my number one when it comes to off market.

Because then I know, like, this person truly has to do something and I'm here to help them solve that problem. And so I think when it comes to spotting out opportunities on the off market, I think it's just and so many people ask me, they said mediums on Instagram, they're like, what should I say here and what should I say there? Somebody is truly motivated. If you're listening, you could hear that they're motivated. Yeah, right.

So I think that would be on the mark when it comes to like on market MLS opportunities. I think what's really important to recognize is having true engagement with an agent in my market. I let a lot of a lot of the deals that I've got from the 80 plus deals that I've worked on over the past four years, over 50 of them have come from the MLS. Oh, yeah. One of those 50 over 80 of them I'm sorry, 80 percent of them.

Of those 50, the listing agent represented me on that. So first, that would be one right. Where you're as an investor, you're not you're not thinking about commissions or you're not thinking about any of that. You're thinking about buying deals. So that's something that is important there, that you could use that card. You have to use it in the right way. But what I have found is that when I get that real engagement from agents, whether they like me or they like what I'm saying, and they see my offer and engage with me, it just having that back and forth just kind of ebb and flow that you get from negotiating a deal.

So many people think they're just going to make an offer, it's going to get accepted and then it's going to turn into a deal. But it's not like that. You've got to make offers and then, you know, you get a counter offer or, you know, you want to make an offer, talk to the agent and see what the motivation is. The seller is so getting a real conversation, going with agents.

I found to be another indicator that, you know, particularly listing agents is another good indicator that you have a chance of getting a deal. You don't they're not going to tell you for sure how I'm going to give you this deal. But you're in the running and that's what you want. You want to be consistently in the running to get your offer accepted or countered some. That way you can sharpen your pencil, you can get your contract in there, make a more aggressive offer after the fact, after you've looked at it with somebody that you trust on the construction side.

So those would be the probably. The two things I think about when it comes to spotting out deals, that's great. So what I heard you say, the most important thing is you're looking for pain. And this is what I find from every high level person that does what they do. When I say, how do you know the right lead? Regardless of your business, by the way, it's the same in real estate. If you come to me and say, hey, David, I want to buy a house.

But you know what? I'm really comfortable with where I am. I live with my mom. It's free. I'll be here for the next 10 years. But if a great deal comes along, I'll buy it. Yeah, you can tell right away, Alex. I guess that's not the client you want to work with. You're going to be just work and work and work and they're never going to go anywhere versus hey, we just moved. I'm coming to California.

I got one month to find a house that is going to be the best client you've ever worked with. They're going to be very responsive. They're going to jump all over what you find them. It's like that with off market deals, too. If that's sellers not in pain, there's no reason for them to give you a discount on the property. And what I find with amateurs is that they find a opportunity and they say, how do I make this work?

How do I make the seller take my offer? What Jedi mind trick can I play? But that's not really how you're looking at it, Alex. You're saying, OK, that's not a deal. If they're not in pain, I'm not going to try to make it work. I'm going to go move on to the next one to find the person who is in pain, who has to get rid of this. So as you're listening, please listen for points of pain.

That's the person who wants your all cash offer, who wants to quit close. The person who's not in pain, doesn't need to quit close. They're they're happy to go forever. And you also brought up a great point about on market deals, in off market deals, how you approach them differently branded. Do you want to jump in there and share with some of your experience what you've noticed about making the mistake of maybe pursuing an on market deal with off market strategies?

Sure.

I mean, like something that bigger pockets where we're trying to get more and more into this differentiated the two, because when new investors come in and they want to learn real estate, they want to buy their first deal. There's a lot of strategies that work for on market that don't work for often. They do work for off and they don't work for honor. And if I said that right. But you get the idea right.

So what I think is important to realize and we brought this up, I think it was last week or maybe one of the previous weeks, is that there is a difference. You don't have to only choose on or on the off. But there's a difference between how you approach both. So I'm actually going to fire this one back over to Alex and ask, like, what are you like when you're trying to let's start with on market. You want to buy on market, which means the property is listed for sale by real estate agent.

What typically are you doing? Like what what what do you find works? Well, for those on market, then we'll switch it and talk about what do you find that's working well for our market?

Oh, for sure. So on market, No. One thing that I do look for is that it's listed within striking distance of making a deal. So, for example, in my market, if I see a deal listed, say, at four hundred thousand dollars, and then I know based on my experience and maybe doing a quick and dirty analysis, desktop analysis of the deal, real quickly, if I need to get that deal, say, seventy five thousand under the asking price or more, I won't pursue it.

I'll let it sit because it's going to probably become a stale listing. That's what I've noticed. It needs to be listed at a good enough price where it almost works off the listing price, because the way I have what I see is that if that agent couldn't even get that seller to list the property at a celebra price, then they're probably not that good of an agent. And it's going to be hard for them to get my offer accepted, whether they write it or not.

Really good. And then you're still going. But that's so good. Right?

And then also there I mean, they're just not going to be able to negotiate. That's probably not good agent, like I just said. And so that's one thing. I just it's out the window. I'm not going to continue to pursue that deal. I'm going to let it sit. I'm going to set a reminder and we'll go back to that. But and obviously, I'm looking forward that it genuinely needs work, because if it doesn't need work, then what value am I going to add?

There's nothing there if it's really good condition, because a lot of times you'll see a deal when it's listed at a good price. But it's just going a good agent. They're listing it low so they can get a lot of offers, but it's going to end up selling for a lot higher than that. And it's in good condition. And it's what I call financeable. If I look at all my market deal and it's clearly listed low, but it's kind of financeable, maybe needs a little bit of work, a little TLC, but it's not really a flip opportunity.

So I think when you look at on MLS and on market deals, things like this, 90 percent of the deals are going to be retail or overpriced. There's that less than 10 percent. That might be an investment opportunity. And those are the ones you want to focus the most attention on. Yeah. And, you know, when it when it comes to those 10 percent, what I like to say is I'm always looking for what I call hidden potential.

Right. It's those things that nobody else happens to see or scares away everybody else. So I always say this example, but I think it's a good one. I always look for to better now in my markets, typically, I'd look for two bedroom houses that have over like a thousand eleven hundred twelve hundred square feet, because I know that the value of a three bedroom is usually way more than a two bedroom in most markets I invest in because it's family versus more young person, transient nature, which is like the one in two bedrooms and studios, and then three, four or five bedrooms are bigger.

So if I can add a bedroom because there's fifteen hundred square feet and a two bedroom house, well, I know that there's probably like two living rooms. And you know Matt. So huge back porch that they're counting, that could be a family or could be a bedroom. I'm always looking for those opportunities like there. I love smells like bad smells. That's hidden potential. I love just like functional obsolescence for this is the stuff that you're like.

Well, that's like for example, there's a bathroom in between two bedrooms. The only way to get to the bathroom. And like if there's one bathroom in the house, the only way to get there is by going through a bedroom. That's just weird because anybody coming over a guest is now got to go through a bedroom to get to that. It's weird, right? But it's not a terribly hard thing usually to move that around at a doorway or to open things up.

So those lights, what I look for on my stuff, that's what I'm looking for is those those hidden potential things everyone else says. Or sometimes you get listings that have only one photo on the MLS because the agent was just too lazy or it's such bad condition inside that they don't even want to take a picture of the inside. That's hidden potential as well. Probably have been sitting on the market for a long, long, long, long time. There's hidden potential maybe there because those sellers get more and more eager to sell if they can't sell their properties.

But on the market for six months or nine months. So there may be potential there. So that's some of the on market stuff that I do. And I know you do as well. What about off market? What's been your kind of go to lately for that?

Well, to go to in the off market, I really like Internet leads. I've done well with those with Google PPC. And what does PPC for those I don't know, paper click. Basically you're paying for clicks to your website and then hopefully those those leads convert. So those have been great. Also still doko calling so I don't do it anymore, but I have somebody on my team that does. So we still call call lists all the lists that we've all heard about, absentee owners, foreclosures, all that.

And so those are the main ways that I get off market deals, which is through the cold calling or Internet leads.

Now you mentioned to me yesterday and I remember the exact number we were we were sitting surfing. I mean, we've been surfing the last couple of days. Right.

And you said you said something like, yeah, you know, I felt like my Google or was a Google ads weren't, you know, doing all that well last year. And then I realized how much I had made off of them. Can you explain how much you spent? It was a Google or Facebook as one of the Google. OK, so what was that like? Because I thought that blew my mind. Yeah. So I ended up getting three deals that made somewhere around two hundred thousand dollars.

And I think that we spent about three thousand dollars a month. So yeah, it was about thirty six thousand dollars. But what happened was in the first four months we got the first two good deals and then it was a huge gap until the end of the year and the cost per lead started to go up sky skyrocketing up the service I was getting from the company I was running ads wasn't what it was at the beginning. And so and obviously I didn't even know that we're going to make that much during that time.

So then I end up cutting the ads off. I'm going to start them up again. Actually, the last two I just got came through my website organically. Oh, nice. So that that was great and deal that we just closed on. Yeah. So it was like I looked at the numbers at the end of the year and I'm like, wow, like I got to start this again. But I didn't know that during it. All I saw was like I'm spending three thousand dollars a month and I'm not getting anything for it in the middle of, of that, of that year, not anything.

But it just was frustrating that the cost per lead was going up. The leads weren't getting better, we weren't getting any contracts. But it's one of the things you just got to keep testing and continue to market because you just don't know what's going to work. But once I looked at the numbers, I'm like, oh, wait, I got to start this again. Yeah, that's so cool.

Yeah, it's and I think also it's another point is that you felt like you weren't getting any progress, but then it all came kind of through at some point you realize you did. I mean, this is true of so many areas of life. Right. And this is why we always tell people trust the process, like we should get t shirts that I'll just say trust the process, because sometimes it's to remind yourself that, like, for example, if you're trying to lose weight, right.

And you're like, I'm going to stick with this diet for a while and doing keto or I'm doing vegetarian or whatever you want to do.

Right, like it all works. Like all those different things typically work if you work them long enough. And yeah, we plateaus eventually. But if you just trust the process of diet and exercise, you'll probably get the shape you want. Now you have to tweak things about, say, like be lazy about it. But the same applies to real estate. The same applies to everything. Right. Like going on regular dates with your spouse is a process that if you did that regularly and tried to improve the quality of those dates, that process should lead to a deeper relationship.

By doing the same with your kids. I taking 20 minutes a day to play with your kid down on the floor. It might seem like I'm not making much progress, but over time, if you stick with it, it's going to work. And so what you're what I hear you saying here is that real estate about trusting the process like those tactics do work. But again, it doesn't mean you're be lazy about it. Doesn't mean all direct mail is going to work.

If to continually refine your direct mail, refine your cold calling, refine your your whatever it is you're doing, your SEO, try to improve your website, try to improve your your cost per click on ads. But if you do that, you're consistent with, you're going to get the results you want. I know, David, you do that with real estate agents stuff as well like it. There's a process behind success in anything that we do, any business, venture, relationship or fitness, whatever.

Yeah, trust the process. And speaking of process, I want to bring up a process we talk about this. David and I do webinars for bigger pockets every week. One of us will do one. And we teach like thousands of people about real estate. Every time the conversation at some point turns this thing that we call the Lapps funnel laps. And it's just a very simple way of looking at real estate where you get leads. Somehow you analyze those leads, like however you analyze leads, you run the numbers on them to figure out where you can pay.

The great thing about real estate is you can it's not too hard to learn. And we do it live every week on these webinars. We work backwards from whatever we can sell it for. If it's a flip or what we can rent it for, what kind of return we want. And then we get a number and then we go after it. So the hell is that leads as Analise as pursue, which is basically make an offer. We don't call it offer because, you know, if one it doesn't fit with Lapps.

That sounds like a nice phrase. Laos doesn't sound quite as good, but it's also because, like, people are like, oh, and offer scarey. Well, it's not always an offer, right. Especially off market. You're not always going to make an offer. Sometimes it's a phone call of just pursuing the deal. You're going after you're having a conversation. So tell me, Mr. Steller, what you know, like, did you have a price in mind that you wanted to get to?

You know, like have you been offered anything before? How did you feel about. I did. That's pursuing. And then finally, if you trust that process, get leads and constantly improve the leads you're getting, analyze them and continually find better ways to analyze and do it more effectively and efficiently and like, you know, tracked and you continually pursue deals regularly making offers. The last part of Lapps is s success. You're going to land the deals you want.

You're going to get success. And that funnel, everyone knows I love funnels here, bigger pockets. That funnel is what gets you deals. And I always say that every real estate investor in the world, everyone follows the system. Just some follow it better. And so when we talked about the skills earlier that you picked up from working as The Apprentice for these companies, I think a lot of those skills are just the lap skills. It's learning how to get the leads regularly, learning how to analyze deals correctly, learning how to pursue offers and negotiate, and then getting those closing.

So once you have that, you can go out there. And the great thing is most of the stuff does not require money. I don't make this point because people are like, well, you know, I don't know what the market's going to do. Should I should I pursue real estate right now? Yes. It doesn't take any effort or commitment to do the lap part of the last funnel. You can get leads for free. You can analyze them for free.

I mean, maybe you pay for a bigger pockets pro membership, which costs you a few hundred bucks a year. So you have our our analysis tools. But like, really, it's not like it's not a lot of investment here. And then you can start talking with sellers, you can start pursuing deals. You don't have to sign your name on that line if you if you felt weird at the end. But if you did if you landed the deal, like, now's the time to practice, now's the time to get into it.

So when the deal does land, you'll feel confident. And like you said earlier, you've analyzed a lot of deals because now you've got that practice, you've got the reps and so you can recognize deals. So anyway, that rant over. But I just love everything that David and I have been preaching for years on these webinars, on these podcasts, like you just like you're the embodiment of it. So, you know, do your let's go some specifics.

Back to your story. How many deals have you done now since going out on your own? Like, what's the what kind of deals were they? So now I've done about fourteen, fourteen deals on my own and they've been mainly Flip's and I've done a couple of a couple of those were joint ventures because, you know, every so often I'll run low on capital. No them I, I like the joint ventures because they allow me to bring in somebody else I trust, like and respect into my, you know, my business.

And then we split responsibilities and they fund the deal. And then I don't typically wholesale that much because I do like to see the transformation of all these properties and also my market. It's a little bit harder to sell. And sometimes when you're buying stuff on MLS, it's also more difficult to sell than if you're buying it off market makes.

Yeah, I hope you're enjoying this episode of The Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast. We'll be right back after this quick break. Hey, everyone.

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So tell me a little more about what your joint venture process looks like.

How do you choose your partners? How do you split everything up?

So currently in my joint venture process, I have two or three joint venture partners. So what I found in the success with is that I will build these relationships with people that they know what I'm doing. They know because I'm out there. I'm pretty active on social media. And so they see that I'm actively flipping property. So if they are, they have interests. I'll let them know, hey, this is kind of how it works. You would be basically responsible for funding the deal, all of it.

And then I would find a deal that's going to make us at least fifty thousand dollars profit and that we can go ahead and split that 50/50. That's currently how I'm doing, graduating to something where I will need to do that as much anymore. But it's helped me get to where I'm at now. So I don't have anything bad to say about it, because if you could find a great deal, it's amazing to partner with someone. And that's where you hear people say, hey, you can do real estate without none of your own money, because if you are good at finding deals, then you don't need the money.

Just go out there and consistently find good deals. Yeah, and I've done that now with Greg a number of times here in Maui. Now, David, you've done that a number of times as well. Like like it just it works, right, David? And you want to add on that, because, again, I know you've been really successful with the JB stuff in the past as well.

Yeah, I'll give an analogy of when you watch the Moneyball movie about the Oakland A's and Billy Beane, one of the highlights in that movie was Billy Beane was looking for players that could get on base. He determined that was the most important metric in baseball. If you got guys that could get on base, your team would win because then other players who hit home runs or had a good batting average would be driving him in. And a walk was just as good of a hit.

What a lot of people make the mistake on is saying, I want to be great and I'm going to go practice based stealing. I'm going to practice. Had to be the best baserunner I can. And they have this amazing skill set that never comes into play because they don't get on base and it doesn't it almost did even help them with real estate getting the deal. And her contract is getting on base with baseball. When you have that, when you have the deal, everybody else who's focused on doing their job well needs you.

The title company needs you. The realtor who wants to sell houses needs you, the buyers, agents, they need you to list that house. The person looking for the deals that are looking to be investors need you. The hard money lenders. I could go on forever. Every single role in real estate investing is relying on the person who gets that deal. And Alex here learned, I'm going to do the most important thing. And then what he found was that finding money was easy.

There's people with a ton of money that are running around looking for who's got the deal. I got to invest all my money. And that question comes up so often to Brandon and I, what do I do? How do I get money or how do I do this thing? And what you find is when you get a really good deal, they come looking for you. They're job, you're their lead, that's their laps funnel is to find you.

They're looking for people like you said to you.

Before we get to the deep, deep dive, which I want to get to the second, I want to talk real briefly about your use of social media, because you've done a really good job over the past few months and the last year of building your your Instagram presence, for example. I want to know why do you do that and what kind of benefit have you seen for that over the last year? Sure. Sure. Well, at the beginning, I was using it just to document my journey.

Right. Just to show people kind of what I was working on and build that credibility when I was working for the other investors. But when I went on my own, I took it a lot more seriously because I did learn some great advice and great tactics from investor go Brit from Brian Pignata at the Mastermind. But the benefit I saw was that I immediately got was I was attracting younger real estate entrepreneurs in my market, which are perfect for me as an investor, because they're out there also pounding the pavement and getting opportunities.

But they don't know how to analyze these deals as well as I do. They don't know how to convert as well as I do. So I I saw a huge benefit when I got this deal that I did a joint venture on and my partner and I made eighty thousand dollars on that deal. And I didn't really spend any money for marketing because I got it from somebody that reached out to me on Instagram. And so I looked at that kind of like the PPC, right?

The Google where I looked at it after the fact. I'm like, wait a minute, we made eighty thousand dollars on that deal. And all I did was share content regularly on Instagram. I'm what I'm already doing, but just, you know, cultivated a little bit better than I was doing in the past. And so now I recently got another deal through Instagram as well through having my hashtag flipping L.A. And so I guess that's trending. And, you know, you pull that up, you could see like top ten of the twenty posts or mine.

And so somebody reached out to me and then we got a great deal that's projected to make over a hundred thousand dollars profit, too. So that's why I keep using it, because it's attracting deals and people that I can influence and help and along their journey, because there's people that are starting out where I was two, three, four years ago. And I'm trying to help those people. And that's who I post for, that customer avatar. That's so good, so good, man, because, like, I think there's a lot of people make the mistake of being consumers.

And Russell Brunson, who wrote a book called Traffic Secrets, this is where I got this phrase from. But people make the mistake of being a consumer of social media rather than a creator of social media. The the consumers, those people just scroll. They're not that we all don't do that enough. But like when you become a creator of social media, you start using social media as a tool to attract people, to build trust, to build credibility.

I mean, I think we've raised in my in my real estate fund open or capital. I think I've raised over twenty million dollars on the last year. We have our third fund launching like going right now.

And I think it's like ninety percent of all the people don't even come from this podcast. Look, which gets a quarter million listeners. It's from my Instagram. Why why do most of the money I raise, why is it from people from Instagram?

Because they see me over and over and over the way that I treat my my friends, the way they treat my family, the way that I analyze deals, the way that I talk about real estate. And it builds trust and credibility over a long time. People bring deals to me from Instagram as well. They bring leads. They bring up potential off market mobile home park. So they have do all these things through social media. Because I am a social media, I'm using it as a tool.

And you are doing the exact same thing. David here is doing the exact same thing as well. And so this is kind of cool to see that in the real world and to shift your perspective, I'm I'm not a social media consumer. I'm a social media creator. I'm a content creator. And even if you don't think you're good behind the camera, that's OK. You can make posts like my most popular stuff. I usually like how to do stuff.

I'm just like here am I in style? I'll be like, how to find houses on the MLS or Seven Tips or here's, you know, whatever. Like just putting out good information makes people realize that you are a valuable person to follow. And the hashtag thing is super cool. I haven't utilized hashtags very much, but that you are you like somebody found you by searching hashtag. What, flipping L.A. they that's just that's super cool. So yeah.

Kudos to you. All right.

So that's cool. Let's transition to the next segment of our show. It's time for the deal de deep de.

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Dotcom pockets are the deep, deep dive is the part of show where we dive deep into one particular property that you've recently bought.

We want to know all the dirty details about it. So, Alex, are you ready to dive into something? Yes. Let's go. All right. So we're going to ask a series of questions here and we'll just need some quick things. The number one is, first of all, do you have I know I sprang this on you and but you have a property mind that we can dive into. Yes, I do. OK, so first question then.

What kind of property is it and where was it located? That's actually two questions. That should be the ideal deep dive question.

One and two is a single family residence and it's located in Venice in the San Fernando Valley. All right. Next question, David. What price did you pay for that property? Five thirty four. Five, five thirty four, and then so we got how do I get on my list in front of us like you do?

Hold on, how do we find it? How did you two go shopping? Is it OK?

That's how we missed one day. We missed one. I don't know. I negotiated the deal. It was a Google ads lead and the lady was very motivated to medical issues going on. But I needed to buy the property. Actually had five hundred thousand or four ninety five hundred thousand to flip it. But she allowed me to do the property subject to. I'm sure you guys talked about it. I'm happy to explain that to. So that was why I was able to buy it at five thirty four.

OK, OK, next question. So I pulled up my list here it was. No, it's not like I've done this a hundred times at this point. It was. What kind of property was it. How do you find it. How much was it? We talked about how you found it, right.

I don't think we asked what type of property was did we still have a house? Yeah. And we talk about where was how you found it and how much was it. We talk about that. How do you negotiate it? How did you fund it? OK, I funded it because she allowed me to take it to take over her mortgage, OK? That's right. And all she wanted was a forty six thousand dollars. So I just gave her the forty six thousand dollars.

And that just came from your own.

My own money. OK, can you explain what subject to means. Yes. So subject to means that the property owner is going to sell you the property and they're going to allow you to take over the underlying mortgage that's on the property. You can't do that with cars. You can't do the other things, but you can't do that with mortgages. There are some details to it and there are some risks to it. I'm happy to talk about that.

But yeah, it allowed me to. It's a creative way to buy real estate. OK, and what did you do with this property once you bought it? Great. So I actually moved into it and made it my primary residence and it was a four bedroom, two bath house. So I did Airbnb on two of the bedrooms in the front of the house. And here's the kicker. I transformed the detached garage into an amazing office that I used to basically grow my business in to launch my company and to do deals.

And so it was like a house hack, but also a business office had one and everything behind every beef with all the mortgage as well.

Yeah. And then after a little bit over a year, I sold it and I made a profit over six figures.

So, yeah, that's my question was, was what was the outcome. So you made a six figure profit. Yeah, maybe right around one hundred. And it was great because I got to live in the property for free basically that, you know, we're very low overhead. Got to use the office space. Got to you know, it was an incredible deal. And if I hadn't done it creatively, that's the deal I could have passed on.

Yeah.

Crazy. OK, what lessons did you learn from this deal? What lessons? Well, first of all, I think one lesson is not to get attached to real estate because I did get a little bit attached to the property and it sucked up a lot of my capital and it prevented me from buying like one or two deals during the time I was in the property. So I think you have to as a real estate investor, you really need to use logic and as much as possible, because I think our emotions get the best of us and we fall in love with what we have.

And we don't see that, hey, there's much better opportunities out there or this is not the best decision for you financially. So I think that was one, even though it turned out great. I did run very low on capital several times because of that property. And another thing that I learned is that you just got to be able to think creatively. And it's not all about price, just like terms as well, because I had pitched the subject to idea to several owners.

This was actually my first subject to deal, because in Southern California, I think it's a little bit harder because the loan amounts are much higher. So taking over someone's mortgage payment of like four hundred eighty four hundred ninety thousand dollars is different than somebody that maybe is only a hundred grand. I think there's that. So just continuing to add different toolbelt to TOOLBELT as an investor is something that you need to do. That way, you're not a one trick pony.

You can do flip and you can do wholesale and you can do creative financing all that. It just makes you a much stronger investor. So those are two big ones that stand out now.

So good, man, so good that there's so many good lessons in here. All right. So we got to start headed toward the end of the show now. Kind of final question, probably actually two more before we get to the famous for first of all, where do you see the next few years of your life headed? Like, what do you plan to do? What's your future look like with real estate? And then second, follow up question to that.

What do you need from our audience? What could they how could they bring value to you? Great. Thank you. So what I see going forward is obviously I'm living here in Maui now, so I'm going to enjoy Maui. I'm going to start flipping here in Maui. I'm also working on my L.A. business remotely. So we're flipping about one property month there. So I'm working to scale that to two. And just now I'm just acquiring more small multifamily, either in Southern California or there's a couple of markets that I want to start investing in, because you guys, the first two and a half years of my real investing journey, I wasn't really making that much money.

So it's only really been about a year and a half that it's been kind of a breakout, you know, for me. So now I'm going to start acquiring rentals and things of that nature because people do ask them about that. And believe me, I would love to have a huge portfolio. But, you know, that's where I'm headed. I'd like to start to build my my rental portfolio. And as far as what the audience can do for me, I'm an open book.

I am interested in helping other people get started in the business because it's helped transform my life. And so I derive a lot of satisfaction and fulfillment from helping other people young in the journey in real estate investing. So having reach out to me, my Instagram or anything, I'm pretty active on that. I respond and I'm happy to help other people. But if you're looking for it, if you have any deals in Southern California that you'd like to sell your wholesaler, hey, I'm still buying in Southern California and also now in Maui.

All right. Very cool. All right.

Well, with that said, let's get to the last segment of our show.

It's time for our famous for. This is the part of the show. We ask the same four questions to you that we ask every week to every. Yes. And then you've heard the show many, many times. So, you know, it's coming. But. All right. With that, let's get to it. Alex, No.

One first question, the famous for current favorite or long time favorite real estate related book, OK, So Mine is that classic book by Gary Keller, the millionaire real estate investor. That's one of the first ones that I came across. And it's just so meaty. And I know there's some stuff in there that is maybe a little bit outdated. But with all the infographics in there and I just love that book, I think it has some classic principles in there that you can't go wrong with.

Very cool. Very cool.

Next question. What is your favorite business book? My favorite business book.

I don't know if you would consider would you consider Mastery by Robert Green a business book? Yeah. So I think that's my favorite business book. Just because it really goes into the idea of like mastering something and having a vocation and having, you know, work is something that you can build a career out of and think of in it long term. And a lot of people want to be doing this and that in a million different things, but then they don't lock in and get great at something.

So I think that book is amazing because it helped me realize that I want to become a master real estate investor. And so that's my favorite business book. It's awesome when you're not surfing with Brandon.

What are some of your hobbies?

I love trail running, so I love getting active in the mountains. So I'm up there. I've been going to a couple of these amazing Maui hikes and I would do a lot of that when I was in L.A., I will say.

So Alex wants to open for the first time ever. Was it five days ago? Something like that. Right. And didn't know what I was doing. So I took him to a pretty actually pretty hard beach to learn on. I was pretty crazy. Not like overly big waves. It's kind of. Anyway, and the first day, of course, like most people, didn't stand up the first day, second day we were out there. Yes, yesterday or two days ago, two days, two days ago, I went out there and yeah, I don't know, within a half hour, whatever you get your first wave rolled.

Right. And it was awesome. And then we at the end of the day, we went out like we are there for a few hours. We're getting tired. So we go in together and we both like for your second, we both cut it together. Alex and I were on the same wave, totally party wave. It was awesome. We're like, well, it was amazing, amazing, amazing.

First to second wave down. Yeah, done. So now you're you're pretty much a pro at this point. So nicely done. All right, man. Well, let's get you out of here. Alex, what do you think separates successful real estate investors from all those who give up, fail or just never get started? I would say mindset for myself. I think having a mindset because it's believing that you can do it. If you don't believe you can do something you're not you're not going to do it.

So I think one of my strengths is having that strong mindset of believing in myself and taking action. But I think people too many times get stuck in that theory and they need to have that mindset, like I can do this and then that's going to propel them to take action. So good. So good.

All right. Mr. David Greene, your last question of the famous four five, where can people find out for the next segment is the famous four is over and now this is famous.

This is oh, this is just like the tumor to the famous for like could just be just like stuck it on their tumor question. What where did people find out more about you.

They can reach out to me on Instagram. That's probably the best way to reach out to me. It's Alex Camacho TV and Camacho spelled S.A.M. Akko. OK, just like Alex Camacho TV. All right. Very cool, man.

Well, thank you for joining us here in the C shed today. It's been fantastic. I got to finally use my new little switcher. So if you're not watching this on YouTube right now, I'm like, I thought the whole show today is switching back and forth my cameras, which is pretty fun. Figure out how to do that. And David obviously is not here. But we'll get you here, Dave, and we'll do another maybe the three of us roundtable some time next time you're out here in Hawaii, David.

All right. Well, I don't know this. This is fantastic. I knew you were going to be good, Alex, and that's why we've been talking. We'll get you on the show for a while. But it's just not. You're here. Just you blew me away. Thanks so much, guys. It's been such an honor. I love BP. Any way I can help other guys, let me know. Thanks, man. Well, David, great.

You killed it. Thank you very much, Alex. This was probably one of I don't know, I'd say one of the most beneficial podcast for people who are trying to learn how to get into r investing that we've ever done.

So thank you for being awesome.

This is David Greene for Brandon. Everything's a funnel Turner sighting off.

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