What’s Trending Post-COVID With Connor Steinbrook

Episode 463: What’s Trending Post-COVID With Connor Steinbrook

 

Although the pandemic is far from over, many things that will most likely trend post-COVID can be seen as early as now. And if everyone in the real estate can catch up with them before anyone else, big things are indeed in store. Mitch Stephen sits down with Connor Steinbrook to discuss not only the importance of getting your license but also the most effective ways to achieve financial freedom. They also venture into the world of credibility marketing and how it can be leveraged to build your authority more than just the traditional marketing methods. Connor also talks about his YouTube mini-course on this particular marketing style, underlining the evergreen power of publishing videos on the internet these days more than any form of content creation. 

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I’m here with Connor Steinbrook. We’re going to be talking about a little bit of everything, but it’s all-important. We’re talking mostly to real estate creative investors and a lot of things to do with marketing and your overhead. We’ll begin with that after I pay homage to my sponsor. Check out Livecomm. It’s a place where you can buy smartphone numbers that capture the incoming caller’s cell phone number and put it into a text distribution list for you so that you can talk to these folks for $0.02 a text. It’s one of the most phenomenal marketing tools out there. If you’re not using this as a lead capture system or mass texting system, you need to think about it because technology is changing the way we do business.  

I no longer need any signs at my houses. All I do is I take the 8,000 people that I’ve already called about owner-financed houses. I stay with them. I send them over to my Facebook page, which is free, that has all my inventory on it and where I train people, what they need to bring, and how much they need to put up as a deposit, $2,000. I train them how to buy my houses, how to look at my houses on their own, how to own a house, and get out of the rip cycle. I’m averaging nine days on the market. No signs anymore. It’s a phenomenal thing. Check out the video on the homepage. You’ll get a feel for how it works, Livecomm.com. I paid the bills, Connor. It’s time to get on with the fun part. Where are you sitting right now? What city? What state? 

I’m in a rental property that we’re rehabbing. Believe it or not, I’m in a shed outback. I came out here because we have a slab leak. I hope it’s not too loud out there. They’re literally cutting a Grand Canyon through my floor. I’m in one of the backside of a flip house that we’re doing here in Denison, Texas, which is a secondary market North of Dallas, where I’m buying a lot of my houses. I‘m getting houses way below replacement value up here. Many are buying up here in a lot of pressures, pushing people out North of Dallas up into these areas about an hour North of here. This is where I plant my flag and I’m swinging for the fences. 

You’ve got to move to where the cheese is sometimes. It’s a lot less strenuous and less inspectors out there too. I know the inspectors down here in our cities are killing us. We have to get a permit to move a ceiling fan 8 inches. It’s ridiculous. The fines were crazy. They’re out there trying to find the living tar out of you for everything they get you on. They’re even fining me for work that the previous owner did without a permit. They’re fining me because I bought the house. They can have all those. I did what you did. I went to some places where I don’t have that problem. It turned out I’m doing a lot phenomenally well out there. It was like, “Why did I ever stay in the city?“ 

Investors are like cats and agents are like dogs. They fight for the same transactional inventory in the marketplace. Share on X

I made most of my monies on the secondary and tertiary markets in the perimeters outside the major metro cliques. What happens is the competition is way less because you don’t have the traveling education system that goes through major cities. You don’t have the $50,000 gurus going through educating everybody. In those hardest cities, you‘ve got thousands of people doing 1 or 2 deals a year. It takes a lot of volume out. These small areas, I don’t think they can get a return to fly out there, do events, and sell these coaching courses. The education level is lower which brings the competition lower. Also, the farther from the cities, there’s less income and average income. People who do get in trouble don’t have as many friends and families who have disposable income to step in and help them. A lot of these areas are also older. You’re seeing the older generation get a little bit older and want to move out into assisted living facilities. A lot of times, they’re looking to sell these properties. It’s what we’re seeing up here. 

It’s a trend all over from what I’m hearing. We’re going to be talking about all kinds of topics. We’re going to touch on each one of them. Connor is a wealth of knowledge. He’s also a marketing expert. I’ve never seen anybody like this guy. He’s phenomenal. I wish I was more like him in that respect. Did I read this right? You’re an advocate to have your real estate license as an investment? 

I am now. I wasn’t in the beginning. I was one of the ones who was at the opposite side of that. When people come into industry, a lot of times they go one direction or the other where it’s on the best thing side, on the sales side. When you get into those industries, you have the social dynamic that click around it. Everybody seems to mesh with who they are. Investors are like cats and agents are like dogs. They fight for the same transactional inventory in the marketplace. For about six years, I was a full-time investor before I ever had my license. I started thinking about it a long time ago, “Should I get my license? There are lots of transactions we’re leaving on the table.“ 

For example, we buy a house. What happens if they’re moving to a house locally in the same market upgrading or downsizing? There’s a commission that we’re losing. A lot of times, we’re getting calls come in. People want $500,000 for a $500,000 house. We spent that money for marketing, but we have to trash these leads we’re giving away, which is easy access to MLS. The big reason was to build residual income side of the eXp business model, I had to have a license. That was a big reason for doing that as well. There are a lot of reasons that investors should have a license. They’re going to capitalize on a lot of leaks in their business if they go do this. If they do it correctly, they fly straight and not going to have any issues. It’s just a disclosure process. 

A lot of investors are scared from the local REI clubs and the local meetups that they go to. There’s this fear of having a license that somehow is going to create all this extra liability and headaches for them. Now it could, depending on what they’re doing, how they’re doing it and what type of strategy they’re doing. For most individuals, having a license is just another club in the golf bag. When the ball lands in the right spot, it’s on the green and in the same box wherever you need to have a club to capitalize on these exit strategies. I’m a big believer of having as many clubs in the bag as possible so that I can capitalize and be more efficient. 

 

I know people who do it both ways. I know people who don’t have a license. I know people who do have a license and it works for them. I know other people who have licenses and it’s not helping them at all. First of all, we should have the utmost integrity and give all the disclosures to begin with. If you have a license and you don’t give disclosures or you’re trying to cover some things or something, you’re looking for trouble. I’m with you. I’m not worried, licensed or not. I’m going to disclose everything the way it needs to be disclosed anyway. It doesn’t matter. 

Everybody is fine with whatever their guts say and however they want to run their business. You guys are fine to do it. I do think that knowing from both sides and playing both sides of the fence does help, at least with the way that we run our investment business alongside. 

May I ask, where do you have your license? What kind of brokerage? If they get a license, what kind of broker are they looking for? 

I hold my license at eXp Realty. It’s a cloud-based brokerage. We’re the single, fastest-growing real estate brokerage in North American history. I’ve been able to do very well here. I’ve built a real estate organization that’s now over 800 agents. We’re in 40 separate states and then going into numerous countries. In 2020, we sold over 1,400 transactions. We’re doing between 150 and 200 transactions a month. It was a big decision to move over there and it worked out. What we’re doing is trying to scale into all these other states and get a footprint in these other markets that we’re not in yet for our organization. 

You’re with eXp, which is a good choice. Let’s talk a little bit about the difference between a brick–and–mortar office, whether you’re an investor, agent, or whatever versus these cloud-based offices now. It’s a changing world. COVID forced a lot of things. It taught people who didn’t know how to buy online, how to buy online. It taught people who didn’t know to use technology to operate their business from afar and how to do that. We learned how to show houses without having to go out to them or not having to go in. We learned how to show houses with no physical contact with our clients, without proximity. I don’t think we’re ever going to go back. It’s making a lot of changes that I’m scared to death for commercial real estate. I wonder what’s going to happen to that. 

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Everything is going to go cloud–based unless it’s a business model like Discount Tire, where you can’t drive a car in a cloud from oil change. To give you guys an idea of a quick rundown of my background, I went off to college and was getting a marketing grip at $20 on a poker site and it turned into a professional one. I did very well for about eight years. This is a similar case study. I put a video on my channel about these three different areas of my life that I’ve noticed this pattern. I got into an early adopter strategy where brick–and–mortar was turning into a technologically internet–based business model. Brick and mortar casinos to cloud-based internet model where we could play more hands quickly than we could live because of the physical time to do the cards so I could increase the hand volume. 

I could essentially be playing one year what would take a live poker player 400 years I calculated to do. I was able to learn quick. The second one, another early adopter stage, technologically advanced marketing strategy was YouTube. I was one of the first people to get into the real estate space on YouTube and I put time into it. I saw this transitioning. The third one would be eXp Realty, which is transitioning from brick and mortar to cloud–based. The big reason why everything is moving away from brick and mortar to cloud-based business models is time, if you think about it. You saw Blockbuster go out of business to Netflix and Toys “R” Us to Amazon. What you guys need to understand is the time that they’re demanding for you and the person who‘s going to buy the product or service. 

Toys “R” Us said, “You have to get in the car. Take all that time to drive down to the building and the expense for your car to get down there. Walk into the building. Walk around the building. Grab the toy off the shelf. Check out and drive home.” On top of that, they want you to pay for the time with the employees who go out there. They have a bunch of people who drive out to a brick-and-mortar physical building to run that building. They’re taking that expense they have as a liability to run that building and pushing it off on us. We’re paying more for the product or service and taking more time to get it. Our time can turn into income or relationships. That’s why brick and mortar is going out of pretty much every industry model, not just in our industry. Definitely, not just in our part of the world. It‘s all over the world. It‘s a trend to run a leaner, cleaner business model that operates with less capital upfront so it’s a less risky business model. They’re saving time on the back end for the product or service that’s someone’s going to go get or use. 

Even in my businesses, I have 6 or 8 Filipino VA‘s who helped me do a lot of things. We’re taking advantage of that exchange rate, which is so beneficial from the US Dollar over to the Philippine Peso. We pay a lot less and we can pay the Filipino more than they’re used to making over there. It’s a win-win deal. If anyone’s interested in VA’s, you can always go to 1000houses.com/VAhelp and learn a little bit about that. Let’s talk about credibility marketing. That’s near and dear to my heart because I’ve been in credibility marketing for a long time. 

 

This is what I think a lot of investors or new entrepreneurs need to think about. A lot of times, if you talk to an entrepreneur, their goal is to scale the business. Let’s say they have X amount of dollars allocated on a monthly basis. It’s $1,000, $5,000, or whatever it is that they’re spending and they have leads coming in. Let’s take a hypothetical situation where they’re generating ten leads a month off the dollars that they’re spending. Out of those ten leads, they close one as far as a contract that they can monetize. If you ask the average individual who’s new in business how to double your business, they say, “I have to double my leads coming in to twenty leads so I can get two deals out of twenty leads.” 

What I want people to focus on is not just lead generation, it’s great to generate more leads, but the conversion of the leads once they come in through a better communication process or building better credibility in the marketplace. In the hierarchy of credibility, you’re standing above your competitors so same ten leads are coming in. You can double your business by closing 2 out of 10 or tripling it by closing 3 out of 10. My goal is to generate more leads but also create a credibility position in the marketplace so that when I show up to these houses or I’m going into a business situation, I’m dominating my competition. If every variable is held constant, meaning sales offer, terms, everything like that, they’re going to look me up on the internet. 

They’re going to find me everywhere. I’m going to give them resources to look into me, case studies, and testimonials. Because I‘m on YouTube and I have a large YouTube channel, this is a form of credibility marketing. What Mitch does with his books and podcasting is credibility marketing, being on stage with a microphone in your hand, and on magazine covers. A lot of people are using the book licensing strategy to get into books that they didn’t write but license those as if they did in partnerships. Anything that you can do to tilt the scale your way as far as a position of credibility over your competition is going to help you increase the number of deals that you get under contract when you’re out there talking to the homeowners. 

A lot of those things have a very long shelf life. I wrote this book in 2008. It’s still relative, thank goodness. It’s still out there now. It still sells. People still give it five–star reviews. I couldn’t believe how much credibility people would give you because you were the author of a book. It was unbelievable. 

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They’ll think of you as a celebrity. When I met you at John Jackson several years ago, you came into Dallas and you’re doing your owner financing speech or something down in Dallas. It does and shifts the mentality. The reason why it does that is think about when we were kids, especially video marketing, which is what I preach a lot like YouTube and podcasts like we’re doing. When you’re little and growing up, what do you do most of the time in dead time. You’re watching television or now you’re going on YouTube. Who traditionally is on camera from your childhood? It’s your favorite sports athlete, movie stars, politicians, and people you see who have this position who’s usually seen as higher than the average person in public. That’s why getting on camera instantly can help shift that belief system towards a position of credibility, which is why video marketing is so important. 

That has a lot of shelf life. I’m approaching my 500th interview on this show. The more interviews I have archived, they’re all staying there and they don’t go away, the more opportunity people have to go through and find what they like. A lot of people, believe it or not, are binge-reading to the blogs of my show. I’ve had people read 2, 3, and 400 of my episodes. I‘m sure they did because every time I say something that I quote from a show, I was like, “Damn, this guy did listen to all of them. I don’t know when he had time to buy a house, but he sure knows a lot about it.” 

People might think that you need to have something special to write a book or be on a YouTube channel. I would like to say this myself, “If it’s what you want to do and you’re drawn towards it, you don’t have to be a house flipper extraordinaire to have a show that interviews people who have done a lot.“ You just have to be a good interviewer, someone who can ask the right questions or listen well. I always need to work on the listening part. 

In YouTube channels, you can bring on experts and be the guy that brings on the experts. One thing that’s cool about the Zoom or the podcast is you get to speak to a lot of smart people. I could ask right now if I wanted to ask some technical questions to Connor about what I’m trying to seek personally. I have the opportunity now to ask him. It’s in the form of an interview but I’m getting my own questions answered. Do you have a YouTube mini–course? What does it deal with? 

Yes. One of the big reasons a lot of people don’t start at anything is that there’s a barrier in the mind of too much to learn. There’s this huge perceived difficulty of doing something. I created a YouTube course. We took out the first section of it, which is a setup process on how to set up, do this correctly, and set up your YouTube channel, Gmail, channel art, and all the links. It’s nine quick videos on the step-by-step process of how to set your channel up correctly. What I want people to do is to get that free course and set their channel up because now they have no excuse to go create content. 

One of the biggest reasons I see people tell me when they know they need to be creating content is, “I don’t have my channel set up,” or “I don’t know how to set it up.” This is something that people do that’s a procrastination of something. They leave it there so they don’t have to go do it. I use this to help them set it up correctly so they know how to do it. Hopefully, once they set that up, they’re more likely to go on it, follow-through, and start putting videos up. 

If you’re interested in getting up and rolling on YouTube, he’s giving away this mini–course. I want you to go to 1000Houses.com/Connors and check out that mini–course. It’s free. If you’ve been thinking about getting on YouTube and introducing yourself to the world that way. That’s what’s so cool about it. You were there for the world to find you, the whole wide world. What a place we live in. Several years ago, this wasn’t possible. Now, you can be open to the world with potentially millions upon millions of followers if you’re interesting enough and delivering content. 

Always remember, it’s about delivering content. People have things to sell. I have things to sell. Connor has things to sell. When you’re out there in the public, no one wants to hear just a great big long sales pitch. You’ve got to give them some content and some useful information. If my show has been any success at all and my YouTube channel, it’s because I focused nineteen minutes on the content and then a minute of like, “If you want to know more, you want me to teach you, or Connor to teach you, go over here.” That’s that. Let people pick and choose. 

I’d like to remind everybody, I have this show for the primary reason of helping people find their place so that they can get financially free. I don’t care what strategy you get. I don’t care who you pick as your coach. If I work for you, pick me. If it’s not me or I don’t know the strategy or the direction you want to go, find someone else. My job here on this show is to try to help you find where you’re supposed to be. Once you become financially independent, you’re going to free up 2,600 hours that you were giving to a boss or a job that you can spend on yourself now and become who you’re supposed to be, whatever that is. Everyone is unique and whatever that’s supposed to be. It’s not all about getting rich, but money certainly helps a little bit. You need something to function. If you have a little bit more, you can move around a little faster and easier. 

 

I had a very smart mentor one time who said, “The only thing money will buy you is freedom of movement. It’s what it buys you. What you do with it can hurt you or help you. It can make you rich or poor, but that’s what it buys you.” He said, “For example, if my good friend died, I just found out about it the day before the funeral, and he lives clear across the country, it’s a very expensive ticket because I’ve got to get a last–minute ticket to drive over there. A normal ticket might be $300 but this ticket is going to be $1,200. I can still get there. I won’t be happy when I get there because I’m burying my friend, but I can get there.” That always stuck with me. 

As a part of what you just brought up, I was talking about this on another show, which is, there’s a sprint in life to get to financial freedom through residual income. Once you guys cover your basic monthly liabilities, mortgage, rent, house payment, and car payment, as what Mitch was saying, you get to know yourself for the first time. You become a different person you get to know because you’re not constantly focused on the muddy water of financial stress. You can work on your faith goals, health goals, relationship goals, community goals, and the other things that you’ve been neglecting for so long. A lot of us do this with our body. Our houses are disorganized. We can finally slow down. You owe it to yourself and your family to sprint as fast as you can to get financially free and then decide who you are and what you want to do with the rest of your life. It’s what I tell people. 

He’s saying the word “sprint.“ I like to use the analogy, “You’ve got to burn your candle at both ends for a little while.” You’ve got to have the day job because you’ve got to keep your head above water, but then in the spare hours, you’ve got to find out how you’re going to get to this place where you exceed your income from this other job and it frees up your time, which is the trick. I wish someone would have taught me that in school because my first inkling was, “I’m going to show the world that I’m a hard worker. I’m going to be able to do all this work. I’m going to work endlessly. No one outworks me and all that.“ It was completely wrong. I fell down. I was so exhausted. 

There are so many ways to make money. I bring different people on this show. I interviewed Ann Sieg, who was talking about Amazon third-party sellers. If that’s where you need to be, go there if real estate is not for you. There are all kinds of ways to become an entrepreneur, get in control of your own destiny and start writing your own ticket as to how much you’re going to make, how long you’re going to stay on vacation, when you can see your kids‘ school events, or whatever. I like to pick students. For me, I’m not a millhouse when I pick somebody. 

One thing that my students all have in common, they’re like, “I’ve had enough of this crap meter. It’s pegged way over in the rent. I’ve had enough with this crap. I’ve had enough of people telling me how much I can make, when I can go on vacation, how long I can go on vacation, when I can go see my kid’s soccer game, what I’ve got to wear, when I’ve got to wake up, when I’ve got to be there, and when I can come home.“ They had enough of it. They start to burn that candle at both ends for a while until they figure a way out. 

I used to think that financial freedom was the word rich people use. When I needed to get financially free, I only needed $3,500 a month to pay my overhead years ago. That’s not rich in America. That’s not as stupid. To me, it seemed like a lot to try to get to come into a mailbox. When I started focusing on that one tiny goal of, “I need $3,500 a month to come into my mailbox,” it wasn’t a tiny goal to me at the time. It seemed like the biggest mountain ever. I accomplished it somewhere between 6 and 8 months. 

I’m not the smartest guy in any room. I have some tenacity, a lot of common sense, and a drive to do it, but I don’t test well. I didn’t do that well in school. Common sense and a good work ethic can get you a long way. I want you guys to go to 1000Houses.com/Connors. Check out that YouTube mini–course and see how you can get some credibility marketing going for yourself. A lot of things happened, my show here and my YouTube channel. 

By the way, I committed to do a YouTube channel. It’s a bitch. It‘s hard. I fly out to Utah and I do a whole month’s worth of content which was 20 or 22 ten-minute segments in one day. I have to write all those segments before I get there and make sure it is interesting and delivering content. It was a big load but I have people who called me and wanted to loan me private money. I had all kinds of opportunities coming from that that I didn’t even plan on. I didn’t plan on those opportunities. I was meeting people I never planned to meet or would have never met.  

These videos, books, and shows go places and meet people that you could never meet from your house or from your city. They have this tremendous reach. Mike calls me a Z–list celebrity. One time, I was in an airport and someone walked up and said, “Are you Mitch Stephen?” What it said to me was, “What a reach? Here I am in an airport in Chicago.” Someone came up, recognized me, and said, “You don’t know me, but I watch your YouTube.“ I was like, “Holy crap.” That was the first time and I thought, “What a reach. What a powerful tool.” 

Not only that, you know this very well the difference why people work for active income versus residual income. I want you guys to think about your marketing, not only to have multiple streams of income but have multiple streams of marketing and have residual marketing. A video you create, once you trade your time into this video one time, it may be fifteen minutes to film a video. If you have 10,000 people watch a fifteen-minute video, your leverage is 1 to 10,000 as far as attention to your time spent to get it, which is incredible. Think about that we can use a free platform and create our own radio channel or own television show with no top-down censorship. When you place a video out there, it’s like placing a little oil hole out there or a fishing line. How do you catch more fish? 

Let’s say you’re on Mississippi, throwing out there for catfish. You put one line out there in the first 3 lines, 10 lines, 100 lines, or 500 lines over time, not all at once. Mitch, you probably started out saying, “We go create 500 episodes but a little bit consistency. A little bit here and there over time.” It has 500 lines out there because YouTube has evergreen content. Meaning like a Christmas tree, it’s green all year long. If you create content that’s relevant, they’ll be relevant five years from now, then you have leads coming in five years from now on those videos. 

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It‘s the most efficient form of marketing as far as your time and capital resources are spent on this for the longest time period out there and acting out there 24 hours a day on the internet. If you knock a door, you’re knocking that door for one second, you’re there. If you send a postcard, you’re in their hand for a second. If these videos are out there, it’s like planting little oil wells out there. Some hit big and some hit nothing. A lot of dry holes, some don’t get any views, but some go viral. If you get a viral video, it can blow up your channel. 

What are you concentrating on mostly these days, Connor? You’re like a lot of the people that I interview and myself. We’re all ADD. We’re not happy unless we have at least 6, 7, 8 balls in the air. If we ever lose one of those balls or someone takes a few balls away from us, we go back out and find a couple of more balls to replace them, if not four more. What are you into and then what’s your main focus? 

I’m still buying rentals and properties here and replacing value that I think have a lot of appreciation when I have extra income or disposable income to place. My main use of my time right now is scaling our organization for eXp. We’re about to break into the top 50 in the company out of almost 50,000 agents. That’s a big focus. We’ve been able to get our organization to grow it over 100 agents a month. That’s where I’m focused on the next 24 to 36 months. I’m going to continue on creating stuff on the internet content, going on shows, doing shows, and creating more shows and content. I’m going to do probably some events, travel around, start doing a little more traveling. You’re starting to see some restrictions in certain areas pick up. I think we’re going to start out with some normalcy to the world. Hopefully, it gets back. 

I know we’ve touched on a little bit behind the scenes. I’m not going to go up on what I think about all this crap, but it’s a crazy situation. It’s been highly politicized in a lot of different ways, but it is what we have to deal with. If people can get outside the fear and uncertainty and shift their filter into seeing that there’s a huge opportunity in lots of different areas because I think that’s what I see out there. A lot of people think that there’s a decreasing opportunity or no opportunity, but they’re not even looking. There are more opportunities than anybody could handle if they made an attempt to look out there. If their filter is blinding them to see it, they’re going to walk around not seeing anything and keep their head down. 

Because of the political atmosphere, to me, it’s obvious. The middle–class and the lower–class are getting squashed. They’re getting more and more compressed. If you don’t get out and find your plan B and work it until it becomes your plan A where there’s no ceiling on you, you’re getting mashed. They’re not giving you a raise every month, but the price of everything is going up every month. I had a $12,000 lumber order for a time to build a tiny house. I couldn’t get there but when I got there, it already went up to $1,000. 

I’m pretty good at hitting my metrics after doing this for so long. We went $15,000 over on a 1,500–square–foot house. If you guys have been flipping houses for a while, that shouldn’t happen. A lot of it was the direct relationship to lumber going up, concrete going up, all sorts of different things going up. Guys, if you’re getting into rehabbing, you need to be aware that supply chains are broken down. We waited for weeks to get two cabinets to finish out the cabinets, which was ridiculous that normally you could walk right into any of the Home Depot and grab these types of cabinets. There are going to be delays, permitting delays, supply delays. 

We waited for two different plumbing parts a week just to do some tiny little plumbing jobs. These are things that people need to be thinking about. I‘d make lower offers and budget for longer carrying costs. I’d be thinking about looking in these neighborhoods when you’re running your comps to see how many houses are on market, how many houses have been on market that have been reduced, what your competition looks like, and what‘s the average days on market. We’re still in a super–hot market over on a macro level, but there are super micro–markets that you’re seeing slowdowns in certain price points. 

I’m seeing $250,000 and under in our area, still screaming hot. That $400,000 to $600,000 price point, a little higher price point is slowing down or flattening. It’s a transition from a lot of people to more affordable living that they feel more secure with what’s coming. A lot of people have a lot of uncertainty. That’s what they’re telling us. I was talking to them about what’s happening in the country and where we’re going moving forward. 

It looks like we’re headed into an inflationary situation. The people who own a bunch of assets and rent houses are going to do fine. People who have a bunch of cash are not so good because it’s going to devalue. I’m trying to deploy my cash. The problem is, the market is so hot. It’s hard to make myself buy some of this stuff. I’m trying to go to the morgue and find some people who are on their last leg so I can try to find a deal. If they’re not desperate or some kind of deadline closing like a foreclosure, tax auction, or something, there’s no reason to sell at a discount because everything is hotter than hell. You’ve got to fight for these houses. You’ve got to fight a lot for it. 

One thing I wanted to point out before I forget. You were talking about that you waited all that time for a plumbing part. I had this revelation when I was in Utah shooting. My mom called me and said, “Because of the freeze down here, all my water filtration containers are all frozen. They blew out. There were no more water filters in town because everybody’s blew out.” I thought, “I’m in Utah. I wonder if I can get one at the Home Depot right here.” I walked right in, picked up five of them and brought them back. I thought to myself, “If you’re waiting on a part in Dallas because of the freeze and all that, call up freaking Minnesota where they don’t run short at crap and get someone to buy the part and overnight it to you.” That‘s a little tidbit. 

We touched on a little bit under the sun. I don’t even know what‘s the title of this, but I’ll think of it. I was like, “What the hell am I going to title this episode? I’ll think of something.” That songwriter thing will kick in and I’ll come up with the right hook line for it. What do you want to tell the newbie out there who‘s looking at this market, looking at information overload, and everyone trying to tell him to do this, do that, buy this, and buy that? Let’s close with that. What are you going to tell this person? 

The first thing is audit your situation. Everything is going to have when you start a business, time versus capital. Most people start with more time than capital. You need to all look at your personal situation and aggressively talk to yourself in a way that you know the sacrifice you’re willing to give up, both with your time and resources that you’re going to spend to get your business up and going. A lot of people just jump in, start throwing postcards out there, doing things, and then they realize that they may not have had a strategy and they’re winging it. 

The first thing is audit your situation. Look at your time availability and resource availability and then go through an aggressive education process and learn different types of strategies out there. What I try to tell people is, “I want people to have at least three different marketing strategies that they’re bringing in deals from and then also three separate income streams.” Having one income stream is risky. Having one marketing stream is risky because it’s the same thing as having one way of bringing an income. I believe people should have at least three income streams or three streams of marketing. If you have two and you lose one, you’re back to the same risky position of one. That should be most people’s goal. 

There are all sorts of different things you guys can do out there to generate leads. You can direct mail, door knocking, outdoor advertising, billboards, paid ads, cold calling centers, all sorts of stuff. You need to look at different strategies. Go out there on YouTube. Learn from Mitch. Learn from me. Figure out what people are doing and identify some that you feel like you could do long-term. If it’s something that you’re already telling that it feels that you have resistance doing day one, you’re not going to do this consistently long–term. You’re going to feel burned out and you’re not going to want to do it. 

 

Find something that you think you want to do, feel comfortable doing and can do a lot of in the long–term. Identify a couple of these. Go out there and fail. Go fail, try it, step back and assess what went wrong. Go back, fail again, step back and assess what went wrong. Go and succeed. Try what you did again. If you succeed again, do it again. If you do it a few times, you have a pattern. You want to create a system around it. Hire virtual assistants, use technology, create a system, and then find the next thing that works. Over time, you do this process and now from failing to finding something that’s repetitious and then you create systems over time. After 3, 4, 5 years, you have a business like Mitch’s that you can sit back and do what you want. Essentially go out there, talk to people and help other people do what he’s doing.  

I was proud the day that I finally had my office systematized. I looked up one day and I had not seen the last 300 houses I bought. I had not talked to the last 300 people who bought my house. I thought, “Finally, why the hell did that take me so long?” There were some reasons. I know what those reasons are. I talked about it on other episodes, but it didn’t have to take that long. I just didn’t know what I didn’t know. It took me a little while to get in the right room to hear it and to be mature enough to know that I needed to know, that I needed to take it. 

Sometimes, you’re not ready for the information, you’re too young in the business or too young for maturity. I’ve probably heard those things for years before, but they weren’t registering. When it was time for me to hear it and I was ready to hear it, it came through like a bullhorn. It was like, “I’ve heard that before. Why did it never strike me like it’s striking me now?” It was because I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t been through enough shit and I hadn’t had enough until I finally go, “I got it now.“ 

If you give no shit, then you’re like, “I’ve got to change.” It forces you to. 

My friend, it’s a pleasure having you. I’d like to thank everybody for reading to get you some Connor Steinbrook. Check out his mini–course on YouTube in getting some credibility marketing. It’s a good course. It will get you off dead center. It will show you how to get started. You won’t have that excuse anymore. Be careful if you watch it because that excuse will go out the window. You won’t be able to say, “I don’t know how to get started anymore.“ That won’t be the case. Go to 1000Houses.com/Connors. Connor, thank you so much. I appreciate you. I like to thank Livecomm.com for sponsoring this episode. Please go to Livecomm.com and watch the video on the homepage. I’ll show you how I’m using mass texting as lead generation, as a sales tool, and apply to my last 300 houses. 

I have only spent nine days on average on the market and I don’t even have to use signs in my house. Not one sign at my house. I put no signs in front of my houses now anymore because I don’t need to. I just post where I post because of what I’m going to show you. I got someone who shows up and I got multiple offers. Check it out. Before I go, speaking of YouTube, I have a new YouTube channel. If you want to check it out, it’s 1000Houses.com/YouTube. How easy does it get? Go there and you can listen to me until you’re blue in the face. 

I’ve got an episode coming out every weekday for a year. They are about ten minutes long a piece. I’m telling you everything I know. I’m not holding anything back. These are ten-minute little segments. I’m telling you all different topics and what I’ve got. It‘s free and easy. If you do me a favor, when you get there, hit the like and share because I need all the help I can get. I am not famous like Connor Steinbrook who has ten billion followers. We’re out of here. See you later, Connor. 

Mitch, I appreciate that I was going to see you and I look forward to connecting in the future. 

Bye now.  

 

Important Links

• 1000Houses.com/Connors 
• 1000Houses.com/Moat 
• 1000Houses.com/Livecomm 
• 1000Houses.com/Coaching 
• 1000Houses.com/aof 

 

About Connor Steinbrook

Full-time real estate entrepreneur out of Dallas, TX. Built the #1 Youtube Channel for real estate investing in Texas and I am a Top 100 eXp Realty influencer with an organization of almost 800 agents.

 

 

 

 

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