Baby-Boomer Opportunity With Max Keller

Episode 485: Baby-Boomer Opportunity With Max Keller

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What’s the opportunity in the seniors’ age group in the real estate industry? Mitch Stephen talks about senior’s housing choices with Max Keller, the author of Home To Home: The Step By Step Senior Housing Guide. He elaborates on essential topics covered in the book and entrepreneurial insights about it. Moreover, Max wrote this book from the standpoint of passion for helping seniors and their families rather than just pure business, making it much more interesting. In this episode, he discusses marketing for leads and innovative programs he manages to provide superior quality service in the real estate industry.

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I got stuck at the ranch, waiting on a delivery. Didn’t make it back to my studio. I called Max. I said, “I hope this doesn’t offend you. I can do this from my truck, but if it’s not what you want, we can reschedule.” He had the attitude that I suppose that he was going to have. He said, “We adapt, we overcome, we get it done. The point is to accomplish the mission.” We’re going to deliver some good information here. I want to thank you, Max for indulging me as I ride down the highway at 85 miles an hour interviewing you.

I’m looking forward to it. We’re going to have fun.

Let’s kick this off with a little bit about your background. I’ll explain how I met you and what I’ve been doing with you. I want to get on this topic on this housing disruption, on what’s going on. How where to look at it. You have an event coming up and I’ll let you explain some of that and see if the people here are interested in where this economy’s going. It’s going somewhere. We’re going to give you our best guesses. That’s all they are, guesses. Tell us a little bit about your background. How did you get into real estate? How did you find your financial independence? Those are the kinds of things that this show is about.

Real estate, it was accidentally. I was teaching math. I was an algebra teacher and coach at a title one school up here in Dallas, Fort Worth, where I live. I had no plans of leaving teaching. I loved it. It was funny. I go to the teacher’s lounge, eat my lunch sometimes. It felt like everybody was complaining about the students, except for me. Now I go fast forward a few years later, I’m the only one who left. It makes no sense, but I love teaching. I loved it. It was fun. The kids are super real and they needed help. I love math. It was like a natural fit. The only problem was my family was growing and my income wasn’t growing. I either had to become a principal or do something else.

I was trying to get a side hustle. I was wanting to partner with people because I liked to work with other people. Everybody was like, “I want to do something.” When it got time to do something, they didn’t want to do it anymore. It was a lot of excuses and I’ve never made excuses. I was looking for something and my friend went on vacation. This was July 2015. He said, “I bought a rent house.” I was like, “You bought a rent house?” He worked for the government. He said his pay was pretty much locked in. He had a big family like mine. He’s like, “I got to do something.” I started looking into it. It only took me a couple of months of learning. You were one of the folks that I was watching back then. Although we work together now and I’m still a fan. I was watching your stuff and not be watching some other people’s stuff and I was learning. Anyways, I got my first deal was a wholesale deal. I made about $16,000 on it. That was December 2015. I started doing active deals.

That first deal is a big one though. Whether you make $2,000 or $16,000, it’s proof of concept. It’s important.

I have been trying to prove the concept for several years. I tried to start real estate in ‘05, went to a couple of boot camps and seminars. I couldn’t put the pieces together. We started having a family and it didn’t seem like the right time. I have more motivation when I was older. I took that motivation, ran with it. I saw that I could make more active income. I left my job a few years ago. I start going full-time and never look back. It was a great way. The fastest way that I’ve been able to grow my passive income and my true wealth is by dramatically increasing my active income. Saving a few thousand dollars a year. There’s nothing wrong with that. It could take until you’re 70 or 80 to have any freedom. With real estate, I’ve been able to have a lot larger chunks of money that I can put aside and save. I’m not working any harder than when I was a teacher. That’s a hard job too. It’s some things pay more in our economy. It’s all about getting that first deal. Once you get that, it’s about building that consistency. I’m just thankful that I’ve been able to do both so far.

I wanted to bring something up that popped in my head while you were talking. For the first time in a lot of people’s lives, when they’re thinking about going into real estate investing or any new adventure, it is a blessing if you don’t make a whole lot of money. It doesn’t take a whole lot to replace your income. For once in your life, not making a lot of money can kind of work in your favor when you’re trying to get free doing another job. The last time I started only made $35,000 a year. It only took a couple of wholesale deals and I had a whole year in the bank and I could walk away from my job and go, “I’m just going to keep living like I was. Not planning on making any extra money at all. I got one year, see what I can do.” That was many years ago and it exceeded my wildest expectations.

Senior Housing: It’s easier to get leads today than ever in the history of marketing because there are so many different channels that you can reach people at. What’s difficult is getting a conversion.

Just an idea that, if you’re out there and you’re not making a lot of money and you’re trying to find something, it might be one of your greatest assets. You’ve been functioning and living, a real convinced lifestyle because that’s how you’ve been doing it all this time. If you’ll keep that mindset as you go into your entrepreneurial-ism, it’s an asset to those people that are making $300, $400,000 a year and they want to become their own boss. This is another problem. This is a bigger problem because someone makes $300,000 a year or $400,000 a year, their lifestyle’s up to that level. It’s hard to take things away from the kids and the wife and all that stuff and say, “We’re going to try something new here.” They’re like, “No, we’re not.” You’re going to keep working. You jumped out, you did some wholesale deals. You found a new viable source of income that probably exceeded your teaching career by a lot.

Actually, to your exact point, I was netting with a Master’s degree, teacher of the year, seven years experience. I was netting after all the insurance and everything about $3,400 a month. My wife was working at our church. What was cool about teaching was a couple of things. One of them is exactly what you said. I wasn’t making a ton. Replacing that wasn’t astronomically difficult. I’ll tell you how easy it was. We got paid as teachers. Our contracts are from September to September. I got paid during the summer. A few years ago, this summer, for three months. The first month that I didn’t get a teacher check, we always got paid on the 20th.

It was, September 20th, 2016. That was the first month I didn’t have a teacher check. I had finished a fix and flip is a pretty simple one that we did one of my first like larger full-size ones. It was still pretty much cosmetic. The net profit on the bottom of the HUD-1 was $34,000. We closed on September 20th. My first month without a teacher check for seven years. For most people who get consistent money, that consistency makes you comfortable and then you don’t make a change. I have wiring for it. I like to take risks and try stuff. I’ve always been entrepreneurial. Did that work out ten months of pay? Now my taxes have been taken out. That’s gross compared to it.

Don’t split hairs here. The point was, you bought yourself a whole another year. The gun’s away from your head. It’s like, “Bill will be okay, honey. It’ll be okay.” Is your wife on board with all this? Was your spouse scared and trying to get you to hold on or was she 100% in? In my experience, most of the time, it’s the other half that’s scared.

She was amazing. We had our fifth daughter. She had Sarah in September. Two weeks later, I’m interviewing and working for free at night for a guy in our local market that has a lot of experience. He has a club and been doing this for a while. She definitely could have used me at home raising five girls all under the age of like ten at the time. She was super supportive. I’m not sure when it solidified. When I got that first check, it was proof of concept. She’s always been super supportive. I’m lucky in that way. She’s real thrifty too. We were living below our means, even when I was a teacher.

I didn’t know anything about money, honestly. It’s embarrassing to say. I majored in finance at a good college, but I didn’t understand personal finance like a lot of people. I went through the Dave Ramsey stuff at our church and I start teaching it. We went from being $60,000 in debt to being no debt and having like $30,000 extra and perfect credit. All of those things weren’t like deal-breakers. I would think I would have been successful even without that. It helped accelerate it and gave more cushion. I think that made it easy.

Let’s talk about this for a second. Dave Ramsey and that whole dichotomy goes against the grain of a lot of leveraging and in buying rental property. How did you reconcile those two worlds?

I saw it like a first half, second half. For me, when I had a lower debt burden, keeping your costs low applies to debt service too. When I started doing that, the monthly amount that I needed was low. That helped accelerate my ability to make up for that income. The way that he looks at debt and leverage. I feel it’s good advice for most people and you’re an entrepreneur. There’s a different class after that. There’s a Master’s degree kind of thing. That’s laying the foundation. Having that foundation made it easy. I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t have been able to save my way to the rentals and the buy and hold stuff. It would have taken until I was 300 years old. I’m still like having leverage but doing it the right way. I think he says the first half is right, which is having leveraged as in like a bunch of credit card debt for stuff you can’t afford. It’s not a great idea. I would agree with that. Having leverage on a property, especially in these inflationary times, having hard assets, that’s a different thing.

Dave Ramsey would have rolled over the grave if he have met me when I was starting. I had amassed 50 credit cards and I had $400,000 on my kitchen table at 0% introductory offer. It was not unusual on any given day for me to have $250,000 worth of credit card debt. I had all these houses that were twice as much as I paid for them. I didn’t have any payments because the introductory offer with these cards was twelve months, no payments, or you don’t get paid back.

It almost got me a divorce because I had spent all of this time getting my entrepreneurial skin thick enough to understand that this was all right to do. Not only was it all right, but it was also damn near brilliant. We’re trying to explain that to someone who still abused credit card debt as bad. I got caught with $250,000 worth of credit card debt and I’m like, “Calm down, honey. I have $500,000 worth of houses that we don’t have any payments on over here. It’s all going to work out.” I had to go to counseling.

I met the counselors and she tells her side of the story of how I’m gambling with our lives. I started to tell my side of the story about how I’m looking at it. I know these things were twice as much when I bought them because I got the comps. I can look right at them. By the middle of the conversation, he wants to loan me his money. My wife walked out. When she figured out that he was thinking about investing with me, she walked out of the session and that was the end of my marriage counseling. That’s a true story. You can’t make this up.

For me, the financial part hasn’t been a strain at all for our family, the risk, all of it. The biggest strain has been probably the hours. Part of it is self-imposed because I love what I do. I could do this all day. I think about it all the time. I’m totally obsessed with real estate. I love it. The other part is that being an entrepreneur, especially as you’re building out your team. Any new stuff that you’re doing takes time. I think that’s the biggest that I had to work on is making sure that I’m having success in my real estate career and not spending the time with my family too.

You have a big family. That comes down to the other part that every entrepreneur gets to is, there’s got to be a balance between work, the money, and the play. I was very bad at that. I learned about the candle at both ends for a long time. The systems were figuring out or even want to figure out systems until I almost didn’t have any energy left, which was a bad place to be, but I did finally figure it out. I want to tell you the readers. I have a relationship with Max Keller and his company, Savior Publishing. If you guys have been instrumental in helping me put out a fourth book that I’m going to be putting out shortly. We can talk about that a little bit in the future. I read the three books before I met you.

The first thing I learned, I never meant to write a book. I never wanted to write a book. No one in my circle would have ever dreamed that I’d written a book. If you’d have told them I was going to write a book, they would have fallen out of their chair. Let’s say I had something tragic happened. I started journaling. Long story short, it got made into a book with some help from some people that saw it, read it. They helped me make it into a book. I had this book out that I never intended to write. The first thing that struck me was the number of credibility people handed me. Because at the bottom of that book said that, I was the author of this 400-page book. Talk to us about books and credibility.

I would have been voted dead last in my high school class to read a book. Let alone write a book. I never would have imagined that in a million years I have dyslexia and a bunch of ADHD and all this stuff. Me, writing a book is with seeing impossible. It happened to me out of a challenge. 2017, I left my job. I’m on track to do about 30 deals for the year. I’m building out a little office. I have some people helping me, systems, the team, all of that. The marketing, it felt like a total rat race. I was doing all the same marketing everybody else was doing. I was doing the cold calling. I was doing the yellow letters.

I was mailing to every list that I could get my hands on. If I didn’t have a lot of leads coming in, I wouldn’t get deals. If I didn’t have deals, I wouldn’t have a business. Financially speaking, it wouldn’t have ever made sense to go back to teaching once you see the other side. I had to make it work. My mindset and how I got into books as I did it the wrong way at first. The first thing I did wrong was when the marketing wasn’t going as well. I did more of it. I wised up. I was like, “This isn’t going to work. What’s the problem here?” The problem was, I was sending out the same messages that hundreds of other wholesalers fix and flippers were sending. A lot of them had bigger budgets than it may.

It felt like a roll the dice. People were still choosing me, but sometimes they weren’t. What I did was I was thinking about doing something different. You get to that point where it feels like a grind. You’re like, “What am I doing here?” Here’s what I did. I made a list of the three most important things for me. What made a lot of sense for me for a deal was I want to have done deals that made a good profit. I wanted to do deals that the seller wasn’t resisting me. They wanted my help. I wanted to work with people that were good to work with. I felt I was helping. They weren’t calling me to bail them out of jail or screaming at me on the phone drunk. I don’t want them to do that.

For me, I found out most of the deals that I was doing weren’t didn’t meet all three criteria. That’s why I was miserable. The ones that did all pointed to the same niche and that was seniors. When I found out, seniors were good for me. My grandma helped take care of me. I’ve always been around seniors. I like working with them. Back to what you were saying about credibility and trust, I found that seniors were slow to trust. When they did, they were loyal. I was getting offers accepted and I was $10,000 less than other people in my market in Dallas-Fort Worth. The reason was that for these folks. They felt like I genuinely cared about them, which I do. They trusted me. That was more important than $10,000.

How I got into books got the idea from a seller. I was out of the house. I was doing the purchase agreement and the adult child of the senior that I bought the house and helped place at a senior living home. The adult daughter was like, “You’ve helped our family out a ton. A lot about this. You should write a book about it.” I was like, “A book? No, I’m not.” Nobody ever said that. That was like the furthest thing from my mind. I was reading a lot. Because I had noticed in my masterminds, a lot of the folks were reading and they were getting great ideas from that. I was reading more than I ever had. I didn’t know how to write a book. I brushed it off.

Senior Housing: Rentals are one in three homes in America. It’s a growing segment.

I was like, “That’s a pretty good idea. I could go from exactly what you said. I could go from the person who knows a lot about senior housing.” I had a good reputation in my local area. I could be the guy who wrote the book on senior housing. All I did was I wrote down all the questions. Sellers were asking me all the questions that they should ask. They don’t know what to ask. I wrote down all the ways to sell your house, pros and cons of each method. If my market wasn’t so competitive, I probably would have never written the book.

If I had known how long it would have taken to write it, I probably never would have. I’m glad I did. It changed a lot of things for me. My first book was called Home to Home: The Step-by-step Senior Housing Guide. I printed out a hundred copies when I got it done. I started handing it out to people I didn’t worry about, “Are they going to think the writing’s perfect?” I wrote it from the standpoint of helping them. Like I was on their flower print, couches from the 78 Sears catalog for four hours. It was the same conversation that I was having with these seniors for four hours. It was in the book. I wasn’t worried about trying to make it perfect because it wasn’t about me. It was about the other person.

What happened was unbelievable stuff. I was trying to give it out to people. I thought maybe some people would pass it around to their friends. People would already have their questions answered. I didn’t know about all the superpowers and how you can give somebody a book. They start trusting you almost immediately. I didn’t know about all that. I didn’t know how people don’t throw your book away. We had a lady call us when we did a workshop at a church. By the way, the churches were not letting me do workshops when I was a sleazy shark, real estate investor, which I’m not. When I would call them up and say, “Can I come and teach your audience and do like a little workshop?” I used to be a teacher in HEB ISD. They’re like, “What do you do again?” I’m like, “I’m a real estate investor.” They’re like, “No, thanks.” When I call and I have a book, they’re like, “An author, come on in.” It had all these like crazy benefits.

My friends started asking me if they could use my book. I was like, “I don’t know how to do that.” They’re like, “You’re not buying houses in Florida and San Antonio. Can you change out a little bit and personalize it so I can use it?” We wrote some more books and now we have three systems about to have four. We licensed some to investors all over the country and then we have a new program that’s coming out. That’s super exciting. It’s a certification program called Certified Housing Educator.

It’s about teaching folks who maybe aren’t ready for their book. They still want to deliver more value to their audience. We teach them how to do that. I’m the teacher of the teachers. We’re positioning ourselves in such a way to where people see us not as a transactional real estate person. This disruption is messing up a lot of people’s businesses right now. We want to position ourselves differently. That’s what we do. I never could have imagined it. I used to watch your videos a few years ago. I still do. When I first started watching your videos, I never could have imagined that we’d be on this show together and doing a book together. You never know. You keep working at it and getting 1% better every day. It’s open, endless possibilities.

I’m coming out with a book called The Art of Private Lending. I’m teaching people how Max’s support and helped. I’m licensing some of the stuff that he’s already written. I don’t have to write the whole damn thing myself. I read the book. It’s dead on. If I was going to say it, I couldn’t say it any better. I agreed with everything in it. We personalize it. I got my cover and coming out with a book. In short order, compared to the first three books that I wrote. Writing a book is the hardest thing I think I’ve ever done. I don’t know why I went back and did it three times after the first time. It’s because of what it brings you after you’re finished. If I can finish this book, it’s going to make a lot of difference. Not just for me, but the people around me. I’m excited for that to come out. You make it easy and the stuff is well written on the topics.

Now about this disruption, we’re talking about a disruption in a population and housing industry. It crosses all lines. It’s called the Baby Boomers. They’re retiring. The last I heard, it was like 10,000 a month or 10,000 a day. I don’t remember. It was humongous. You got to understand this first and foremost about the Baby Boomer generation. It’s what happened after all those men came back from World War II. They were ready to make babies and have families. That population explosion, if you look at it, want to graph or whatever, the best way to describe it is like a basketball passing through a garden hose. It changes everything. When they’re kids, it changes the way babies and diapers, and everyone’s trying to sell to this massive population. As they become young adults, then they have different needs.

The whole industry for say like six-year-olds to eight-year-olds started to change. As they got their driver’s license, people manufactured cars, especially for them. These people are all turning this age. If we’re going to be anybody in business, we got to accommodate these people. You’re talking about now, all these Baby Boomers are senior citizens now. They’re getting old and dying. With this, becomes change. Whenever there’s changed, there’s chaos. They’re causing this massive amount of chaos. They’re ceasing to be able to function and/or to be alive. This causes a drastic change.

I like that saying from an anonymous, “Wealth comes from chaos.” While that can be taken in a way where you are like your grave dancing or you’re a buzzard sitting on a high line wire waiting for something to die. These people are going to pass or they’re going to go through these phases with or without you. Someone’s going to have to deal with the property and the businesses that they’re leaving behind. Someone has to deal with the farmland and the ranch land and everything because someone has to deal with it. It might as well be you. The question is, and that’s what I like about you, Max, can you do it in a way where you’re helping them accomplish what they need to and still get what you need out of it? That’s what I like about your approach. Talk to us about this undulation in this market.

There are two disruptions going on at the same time. Where they intersect, I believe, if not the most like the top three most opportunity for real estate investors, agents, and brokers in the next twenty years. The first part of what you said is exactly right. Ten thousand people are turning 65 every day in America. That’s a tremendous amount of people. The fastest growing age group in America is 85 plus. That’s 4,000 people a day. I got to share a stage with Harry Dent, who wrote the book, The Demographic Cliff. What he said in it was is, “If you want to follow the economy, it’s pretty simple.” People do very predictable things as they age. What somebody does and how they spend and how they interact with their environment and the economy when they’re 20, 40 and 60, those ages. The people within that age group do very similar things.

Do you want to work with the fastest-growing market or the smallest growing? I want to work with the fastest growing and I already liked working with those folks anyway. For me, that’s a no-brainer. The other disruption that’s happening at the same time is Wall Street. Wall Street has a major appetite for single-family homes. Since the last downturn, the ‘08 downturn, they’ve bought up about 200,000 single-family homes and good neighborhoods, nice neighborhoods in San Antonio, Dallas and all over the country. They’ve figured out how to get them to produce. What’s interesting about Wall Street is they have a tremendous amount of money. Their money is much cheaper than local real estate investors. They have a lot of money to invest in marketing. Wall Street’s investing billions of dollars in companies that never are even profitable. If we’re getting double-digit, internal rates of returns on decently managed, single-family homes. Any amount of yield that they can get, that’s more than zero is going to be exciting.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. It is as far as the single-family home. There used to be a time, if we go back further enough when those people got back from the war, World War II apartments weren’t all controlled by big companies. They were local partnerships. People would get together and do these. Wall Street and big hedge funds and things like that started to come in and get more involved in apartments. They’ve already owned high-rise buildings and they’ve owned hotels. Until ‘08, they haven’t owned a lot of single-family.

They’re buying up storage facilities.

Anywhere that they can get a yield. The problem is, a lot of people see these. If they don’t see the Wall Street companies in their market, the forward-facing part is iBuyers. These iBuyers are paying cash. They’re closing quickly and their money comes from Wall Street. The money’s a lot cheaper. They have a lot of it. I read an article where Zillow is on pace. Their goal is to purchase 5,000 homes per month. How they plan on doing it is number one, they’re attracting 157 million people to their website. Local investors can’t compete with that. They are making an average profit on their fix and flips of $1,723. You, me and nobody reading here is going to go and flip a house, put $30,000 in and make $1,700. They’re trying to grab market share. During the last downturn, a lot of the hedge funds and iBuyers disappeared. Their only exit was fix and flip. When the market tanks, it’s harder to make that strategy work.

Now, they know how to make these single-family homes cashflow. Rentals are one in three homes in America. It’s a growing segment. This creates a huge problem for real estate investors, agents, and brokers, who are seen as transactional real estate person. If somebody wants a transactional real estate person, they can go to their phone and find about 50 people in every market in the United States that can pay a lot more money than you probably can, especially a cash prize.

What are people going to do? We’re going to have a training that’s coming up. We’re going to go deeper. Essentially, here’s our hypothesis and what we’ve proven for the last few years. There are different numbers. Some people say 95% of people sell their home traditionally through a real estate agent and 5% sell to an investor. What people are not going to the next level is within that 5%, there’s always going to be a percentage of people in every market that will pay more to have somebody walk them through a complicated situation and hold their hand along the way. What we’ve done with our books, content, certifications is we’ve figured out how to pivot from being the transactional house person in a price war that you cannot beat Wall Street in to being the trusted expert, the non-fiduciary housing advisor.

This is a huge void. Most people don’t have CPAs on speed dial. They don’t have tax planning attorneys on speed dial. They’re regular people who were bus drivers, teachers, or police officers. They retired. They got a little pension, Social Security, maybe they own their house outright. They haven’t planned for all this kind of stuff. What we did was, I took the Dave Ramsey model, which I liked his education. We created education to educate these folks out there, this huge growing number of people through our different books systems.

By educating them, it attracts them to us because we’re showing people all their options. Not just the ones that make us money. We’re showing people the pros and cons because there are pros and cons to everything. In return for that, they see us differently. They know they’re not getting the absolute best price. There’s always a segment of the market that doesn’t, that’s not their number one concern. That’s who we focus on. It’s a large group of people. Now I can’t find anybody else in our market that serving them. That’s what we’re doing. That’s what I figured out how to do with the help of our community.

You’re overcoming price was with some service and personal touch. You’re going to always win your share when you give service and personal touch. Even if you’re not the cheapest guy or willing to pay the most, whatever the case may be. I get it. You have a book where you go out and you educate seniors or family members who are in charge of seniors. How to make this transition from the home that they lived in over to the senior assisted living or memory care or whatever it is they need and all the pieces in the middle and how it works. You help them to probably one of the most emotionally difficult times in both of those family’s lives. The family members who are getting older and the family member who’s having to take care of the old person.

I hope I condense that down. What Max is saying is, there’s this whole market out there. He’s already written the book, let you license it, put your cover on it, title it, whatever you want to change, whatever you want to in the book. If you want to change some things or add your own personal, you’re going to give your profile, thank you, and preface. The work of that book has already been done. The explanation, the coaching, the teaching, all the different scenarios have already been figured out. They’re already done. He’s offering you a chance to not only learn about this demographic, how to navigate it, create a win-win situation, make a profit. You also grab onto your book with your name on it, and become that expert a lot easier than having to pound them with repetition postcards, letters, calls and everything over and over again.

We’re going to go deeper into the training. That’s coming up here in the future. Our opinion is that traditional marketing methods are eventually going to be obsolete. If we fast forward to a few years down the road, I think people look back and say, “That’s already common knowledge.” What we’re offering people as a way to get in a little bit earlier because folks are still not figuring it out at all. I talked to some people about this and they get it immediately like you and others. Some people have a blank stare and they can’t figure it out. There’s a lot of great companies out there that are helping investors, agents and brokers get more leads. Leads are not your problem. It’s easier to get leads now than it ever has been in the history of marketing. There are so many different channels that you can reach people at.

What’s difficult is getting a conversion. It’s getting somebody to say yes. I tell people the reason that I used to have to give out 5 or 7 touch campaigns on my postcards is that intrinsically the actual postcard had almost no value. I was trying to hit a timing bubble and then hope that I could win a prize for it that gets more difficult as Wall Street gets more excited. This approach that we have is different. We position ourselves as teachers, educators, people in the local community that is trying to help. We share what we do. We attract people to us that want to work with us.

What’s nice is our marketing lasts longer. We can give somebody some of the educational materials that we’ve already created and we let our students license. Folks will keep it for 3, 6, 12 months, 2 years. Now, somebody may call you and it’s a lead. Before I had a book or any kind of content, I felt I had to race out to the house. If I wasn’t the first one there or the last one, somebody else was going to get the deal. Now, I don’t have to do that anymore because I say, “Have you gotten a copy of our book yet?” They’re like, “Your book?”

I go, “We wrote The Step-by-Step Senior Housing. You don’t have to be a senior to get benefit from it. Chapter Three is all the ways to sell your house pros and cons of each. If I send you an autograph copy now via courier, will you read Chapter Three before I come over? I don’t want you to make mistake or act hastily.” They don’t know what to say. They’re like, “Yes.” What happens is, I go, “Do you need me to come out right now? Is it 911 or can I come out a couple of days?” They’re like, “No, a couple of days is fine.” Their tone changes. A lot of sellers right now are like, “The girl who gets asked to prom by a hundred people.” They have an inflated opinion about their house.

We let them know that where we’re at the market and how we’re here to help them. We show up two days later, they’ve already read Chapter Three. They’ve read the whole book. They’ve seen my personal stories about dedicating it to my grandma. They know, like and trust me a lot more. They’re pre-qualified. I have to spend money. It costs me $30, $40 to send it via courier. In this competitive market to have exclusive deals, people call and ask if they’re qualified to work with me, that’s worth a lot more than $40. That’s our approach. It’s different. People have never seen it before. They look at it the first time. They’re so complimentary. I haven’t had one person say, “That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard of.” They’re like, “This is genius.”

Senior Housing: Figuring out how to pivot from being the transactional house person, you will survive in the price war in the real estate industry.

When I got the award for Innovator of the Year, I was sharing a stage with Robert Kiyosaki. He was there and I got my award. He was asking me for a copy of my book. He was like, “This is so cool.”  I was Innovator of The Year at this conference. I’m like, “How is this innovation?” Books have been around for thousands of years. This is not like a brand new concept. I didn’t create some cool app or any of that. I took something that’s been around a long time and applied it to what we do in real estate. It’s like you’ve been doing for motivated sellers and private lenders and now some other people.

You innovated an old idea.

We’re going to go to 1000Houses.com/Max. Over there, it’ll be everything and anything you need to know about it. What’s going to be covered and he’s got some giveaways or some samples of his stuff. Everything will be over there that you need. Also, if you need to reach out to him to get clarification, or want to talk to him firstly, I’m sure Max will have all the information over there for you. I appreciate you taking the time to come on.

It’s going to be fun. If you’re looking for a different way to market for leads, anything that we’ve talked about has spurred some curiosity, come up to the training. We’ve got it. It’s coming up soon. I have to limit the number of these I can do because I’m still active in real estate. Mitch is a customer and a friend. I’m looking forward to training you all about what I’ve known, learned in these last few years. Hopefully, you can get tremendous benefits from it.

Go to 1000Houses.com/Max. Max, I’d like to thank you so much. I can’t wait for my book to come out. It should be coming out soon. I appreciate everything you do for everybody. I want to thank everyone for coming out to get you some Max Keller and check out Savior Publishing. Again, go to 1000Houses.com/Max. You’ll have everything you need to know. Max, we’re out of here.

Important Links

• 1000Houses.com/Max
• 1000Houses.com/TFF—Get Your Self Direct 401K set up before end of the year
• 1000Houses.com/Livecomm
• 1000Houses.com/100
• 1000Houses.com/101
• 1000Houses.com/books – Find Mitch’s latest book The Art of Private Lending

About Max Keller

Max Keller Max’s company, Savior Home Buyers, specializes in helping Seniors with their housing choices. Max’s inspiration, to focus on helping Seniors, was birthed out of his close relationship with his Grandmother, “Momo”. Although Momo is in a better place, Max’s mission and passion to serve Seniors and their families continue daily.

He considers it a great privilege and blessing to have been able to serve hundreds of local Seniors and continues to do so tirelessly. Max holds a BBA in Finance from the University of Texas at Austin and an MA in Teaching from Louisiana College.

At the time of this publication, Max, his wife, and children live in Fort Worth, Texas, USA.

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