PODCAST

The Real Estate Technology That Helps to Sell Houses

Mitch Stephen|By December 28, 2016

Episode 40:

As Managing Member of Rylex Capital, LLC, Nick leads a diverse team of real estate focused professionals; primarily representing Hispanic home buyers throughout the Texas. The properties purchased and sold through Nick’s direction are usually single family homes with a maximum market value of $150,000.

Respected by his colleagues for his creative deal structuring, problem solving and leadership skills, Nick possesses the singular ability to empower his colleagues to create a collaborative, cooperative team. Continuously stressing the importance of building and maintaining systems and relationships, he provides associates guidance with the market knowledge, technology and resources they require to effectively meet their client’s needs.

Originally from Phoenix, Nick earned degrees in Operations Management and MIS from the University of Arizona. His corporate career included positions with Motorola, PepsiCo and Baskin-Robbins as well as several tech startups before shifting his focus to real estate. Nick resides in Plano, Texas with his wife and two children. Nick enjoys traveling with his family, coaching, volunteering weekly at a local food pantry and church sponsored mission trips.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

Why Nick changed from flipping to owner-financing
Why Nick uses LiveComm.com for his phone number collection
How Nick has been able to increase the amount he receives as a down payment on his owner-financed houses
Nick’s real estate technology advice
The kinds of people that Nick would lend to that would get declined by the bank
Why it’s so important to spend time with like-minded people
How much business Nick has done this year and the kinds of deals he’ll work on
Why you need to monetize every lead
Why Nick gets to a contract as fast as possible
Nick’s organizational structure
Why Nick focuses on systems that can accomplish tasks fast
Why you should have people who get paid when you get paid rather than employees
Why Nick uses overseas virtual assistants

Resources:

Transcript:

Welcome to the Real Estate Investor Summit Podcast coming to you straight from the smallest big town in Texas with your host, mentor and owner-financing master, Mitch a.k.a. “Be the Bank” Stephen. The possibilities of life without a J-O-B start here! So grab your pen and paper and listen up. Y’all just might figure out how to fail forward to financial freedom.

Mitch Stephen: This is Mitch and welcome to the Real Estate Investor Summit podcast. This is your all-knowing and gracious host, Mitch Stephen, and I’m here with Nick Legamaro. He’s gonna talk to us about how he’s selling houses, how he’s using technology to sell houses and just all around about his business. This guy is an amazing guy. He did about 40 to 45 flips and then figured out that was kind of a job and he wanted to include some kind of cash flow and he started owner financing houses so he’s a guy exercising a strategy that’s close to my heart. But right now, I gotta pay homage to a couple of sponsors and I stand by ’em. We’ll be right back.

Are your payment collections falling further and further behind because you’re too nice? Do you dread those collection calls? Is your account analyses being sent out each year? Is record keeping just not your forte? Let moatnoteservicing.com stand between you and your payers and handle all these issues and more. M-O-A-T, moatnoteservicing.com because you should be out making deals! (singing) Moatnoteservicing.com cause you should be out making deals.

What if you could capture the phone number of every person who ever called your company? What if you could track the success or failure of every advertisement effectively and affordably and then imagine being able to text all those prospects paying just pennies to reach the entire group? Go to livecomm.com, that’s L-I-V-E-C-O-M-M .com and watch the four minute video on the home page. Other mass texting companies want to charge you five cents per person on the list. At 5,000 people, that’s $250 per text! Who can afford that? With LiveComm you can text 5,000 prospects for under nine cents total. LiveComm has so many features, it’s impossible to tell you about them all here. Contact livecomm.com today. Mass texting done right. Mass texting you can afford.

More on Nick’s Background

Mitch Stephen: All right. This is Mitch and I’m here with Nick Legamaro. Let me tell you a little about Nick before we get started. Nick is a managing member of the Rylex Capital, LLC and he leads a diverse team of real estate focus professionals. They specialize in the strategy of owner financing here in Texas. Properties are all bought and sold through Nick’s direction and he’s primarily into the single family homes with a maximum market value of $150,000. He is very well respected in business by his colleagues. He loves to solve problems. He possesses a singular ability to empower his associates to collaborate and be cooperative and to continuously grow. He is a great guy when it comes to systems, to automation and real estate technology. He likes making money but he also likes his time freedom which is very important and near and dear to my heart cause what good is the money if you don’t have any time? And so, we’ll get right on to it. Nick, how you doing today?

Nick Legamaro: I’m doing great, Mitch. Thanks for having me on.

Mitch Stephen: Okay, so you did about 40 to 45 flips and then somehow you had a revelation and you switched your strategy over to owner financing and you’ve done between, I don’t know, last time I talked to you, about 300 to 350 owner finance deals. Is that right?

Nick Legamaro: That’s probably pretty accurate. We started the company in 2012 with the focus on owner financing to buyers that don’t have the conventional ability to go down to Chase or Wells Fargo or Bank of America and get a loan and it sort of evolved from there and you-

Mitch Stephen: Now, right before, right before … But you did some flips in your life, right? Before you started owner financing. So explain to me the revelation of why the transition. What were your thoughts?

Nick Legamaro: Yeah, well, you know, as people that have been in the real estate business for a while now can remember, not that long ago, around 2006 to 2008, the real estate market came to a standstill from the ability to buy, the ability to fix and flip, and to be quite honest with you, it was like swimming upstream and profits started to decline, the ability to find properties and more importantly to liquidate them in a timely fashion was just not a profitable venture. But more than that-

Mitch Stephen: The banks stopped loaning money so that hampers you when you’re trying to buy, if that’s where you’re getting your funds, and also then when you’re trying to sell, you know a lot of people had to use the banks to buy properties from you and so it was getting harder for you to sell properties so the banks dried up. So, you know, that’s kind of the reason why I love the owner finance strategy. We’ve taken the banks out of the equation. If you’re using private money to buy and then you’re funding the sale, you don’t need a bank and that’s why I love the owner finance strategy and you kind of came to the same conclusion a lot of people did around 2008 when the recession hit, right?

Nick Legamaro: That is correct. What I learned probably more than … The most valuable lesson that I learned during that process was that it wasn’t a scalable business. It was a great business if I was looking to make a couple hundred thousand dollars a year but it just wasn’t a replicable, scalable business that I could make a significant return on my energy and effort and that’s really what drove me down to the owner finance model because this is not a rental portfolio where I’m managing properties and tenants. We’re basically creating paper and being the bank and that’s ultimately what this is all about.

Mitch Stephen: Yeah, so you’re able to have your cake and eat it, too. You get down payments and you can, you know, a lot times live off, well not a lot of times, the goal is you can live off your down payments and pay your mortgage and everything so you get a paycheck today but you’re also creating a tremendous cash flow that just builds and builds and builds, right?

Nick Legamaro: That is correct. The challenge for us has been as the market has allowed us to grow at a very rapid rate, is that unfortunately, or fortunately, however you want to look at it, is we’re unable to basically hold all this paper because the ability to go out a repeat the process doesn’t allow us to have the cash flow necessary to go and basically keep acquiring unless we raise private money or get bank lines or whatever the case may be. So we’re sort of forced to sell some of the notes that we create to be able to get the cashback to go repeat the process. So as we continue to grow, that’s one of our main challenges is how do we, you know, long term, keep everything. But right now, as long as the market continues to grow at a faster pace than we can fund, we’re sort of having to liquidate a portion of our notes to be able to get cash to repeat.

Mitch Stephen: So this is good because we have a link here for people to connect with you. It’s 1000houses.com/sold. Make sure that sold is all lower case. And so you just expressed a need for note buyers and so if anyone out in the audience is a potential note buyer and would like to talk to Nick about note buying, just go to 1000houses.com/sold, s-o-l-d, all lower case, s-o-l-d, and so what you’re saying, Nick, is your ability to rinse and repeat this process and create note after note after note after note in your portfolio, you can do it so fast and at such a pace, that you have trouble holding everything so you need a note buyer to come in and buy a bundle of your notes, or one of your notes, so that you can get the money out, get your profit out and continue the cycle.

Nick Legamaro: Yeah, that’s correct. And, you know, regarding that, at the end of the day, on the notes that we do sell, you know, we’re providing a double digit yield to the investor, you know, securitized by the real property and what’s unique about we’re able to do, I mean, this is Economics 101. It’s supply versus demand. The number of properties that are available to sell versus the number of buyers that are available that need seller financing, it’s not even funny. I mean, it’s-

Mitch Stephen: The buyers outweigh the inventory is what you’re saying?

Nick Legamaro: Absolutely. For example, I have, in our database right now, we have over 20,000 buyers that have expressed an interest in purchasing one of our properties that have a significant amount of cash to put down but just need help. They can’t do it-

How Nick Built His Buyer Database

Mitch Stephen: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You said 20,000 buyers in your database. How are you collecting … How are you collecting this database?

Nick Legamaro: Well we use the LiveComm platform which I know that you’re familiar with and basically LiveComm is a database management platform that allows us to basically collect client data or buyers information or sellers information for that matter, through telephone numbers. So basically the way we use LiveComm is that we market our properties, whether it’s through social media, through signs, through Craigslist, through-

Mitch Stephen: Websites or whatever.

Nick Legamaro: Websites, seminars, you name it, we do it. And we collect a bio profile. And in that bio profile they register, one of things that we get is a phone number. What’s nice about LiveComm … Well first of all, most people today use cell phones. So I would say 95% of the people that register are registering with a phone number. First, that’s what we’re asking for but what’s nice about LiveComm was when the number comes in, it scrubs the data and it has the capacity to identify whether that number that’s come in is a cell phone or a landline.

Mitch Stephen: Or a landline. Yeah.

Nick Legamaro: Which is extremely important to us because the main function of the LiveComm platform is to be able to text notify these buyers. I mean, I would never be able to call potentially 10 or 20,000 buyers when a property becomes available, however, with the LiveComm platform I can very easily go in and create a text message, let them know about what we have and give them instructions on what to do once they call our number. That’s in the process.

The Real Estate Technology That Will Get You Deals

Mitch Stephen: Yeah, so it’s captures the incoming callers phone number and puts it into a text database that you can mass text at will. To put it in a nutshell, right? Because I know a lot about the system, I participate in the system and I’ve been using that system now for two or three years. I also want to tell you there’s something new about it in case you don’t know because it sounded like you might not know. There’s now a landline bucket for every number. Because, and the reason why that’s important, is when you’re trying to buy houses, you really don’t care what phone number it is you’re collecting. You just need to collect the phone number from that person. There’s also another feature just added, I mean, days ago, maybe a week ago.

It’s called Instant Call Connect, okay? So you’re gonna be very interested in this if you haven’t seen it yet and it sounds like maybe you haven’t. Instant Call Connect is when someone calls your LiveComm phone number about a specific house and they’re listening to the recording of that house, you know, three bedroom, two bath, 1200 square feet, yada-yada-yada-yada-yada, and you’re listing all the features of this house, you’ll get a text saying that someone at the phone number, 210-669-4156, is listening to your recording at 123 Main Street, right now. And so you can send that text to your sales guy or have it sent to whoever you want to and he’ll know that someone’s listening about that house right now, and I know what that recording is about, you know, 30 seconds to a minute, so give I’ll give it a second here and then I’m gonna call that number and that guy will be engaged with this house right now. And then I’m gonna present myself to talk to him about it if he wants to.

It also gives the incoming caller the option, if you just state it in your recording, that if they’ll just, at the end of this recording, if they’ll just hold for a few seconds, they will automatically be connected to a live person, if that’s what they want. So that’s the new feature. What do you … I can hear your brain rolling already.

Nick Legamaro: Yes, it is. I mean, that is just gonna be, you know, icing on the cake, per se, because the way we use it, it’s very efficient and very effective because we can do things like advanced scheduling. So I could have our assistants go in and schedule the week’s work load in advance and schedule a time and date on when we want a property to be marketed out, if we’re gonna go an open house or if we’re going to list a new property. It’s very convenient to be able to go and do all that at a certain period of time and know that … Especially like for weekends, Saturdays and Sundays. So my staff doesn’t usually work on the weekends but we still sell properties on the weekends, so-

Mitch Stephen: So, in sending out messages, let me tell you one way I’m using that scheduling tool is every first and fifteenth of the month I have it scheduled to send out a text that says, “If you’ve already found a house or you’re no longer in the housing market, please unsubscribe”. Because it costs a little bit of money to text these folks and you don’t want anyone on there and you don’t want to be spending money texting people that are no longer interested, right? And so-

Nick Legamaro: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

Mitch Stephen: Yeah. So I just have it pre scheduled to make that announcement on the first and the fifteenth of every month so when people on that, your 20,000 people list get it, say well, you know what, I just bought a house and I don’t need this anymore, they can quit burnin’ some unnecessary pennies. You know what I mean?

Nick Legamaro: Yeah. It’s extremely important, especially if you started getting into a database of the size of what we’re dealing with, you know, 10, 20, 30,000. It gets, even at two cents a text message, it can get costly. But I will say this, what’s really cool about the LiveComm platform, and one of the reasons why I use it is because there’s also the ability to do this where they have the algorithms and the platform’s capable of basically taking … Every cell phone number has an email address attached to it from the provider. So what the system does, it takes that cell phone number, converts it to an email, sends it to the carrier, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, whomever it might be, sends it over as an email, converts it back to a text message on the recipient side, therefore, there’s no cost. So you can actually use this platform for a flat fee and send out hundreds and hundreds of thousands of “text / email messages” for no additional charge which is huge.

Mitch Stephen: Yeah, there’s a free feature on it. Sometimes the free feature won’t hit every single person on the list because, there’s a multitude of reasons but one of the most obvious reasons is phone companies sell to each other all the time and sometimes the prefixes are caught in the middle or whatever, but if you choose a premium sending which will cost you about two cents per person on the text list, it’ll make sure that it hits every single one of them because in essence, you’re hiring the phone company at that point and they’re getting a fee to, like give you valet calling. You know? Because they’re gonna make sure that they figure out … Their systems will make sure that every single one of them get hit.

I use the free feature all the time because it’s usually enough to sell my house. If I have a house that’s stuck and it’s not moving as fast as I want it to, I might opt into do the premium feature and hit that other handful of people that maybe we’re getting left out in the free feature. Do you follow me on that?

Nick Legamaro: Absolutely.

Mitch Stephen: Yeah. But I usually never have to pay the premium feature because there’s so many people in my database as well that just sending out to the number of people that get it for free is enough to get the trick done. And I have found that since I started using the system my down payments go up, my inventory stays less time on my inventory sheet and this all translates into money, mostly because I have … You know, tell me your experience with … You get a lot more choices. You don’t just get one buyer anymore. You get two or three or four and you get to pick the best one. Are you seeing that?

Nick Legamaro: Oh, absolutely. That’s why the numbers are so critical whether we’re buying and / or selling because we’re only talking about how we’re using the system on the sell side but as we’re looking for buyers, or, we’re looking for properties to buy ourselves and we’re looking for motivated sellers or even investors to sell properties, too, that don’t fit our model, absolutely. Because, there again, it’s Economics 101, it’s supply and demand. The more demand you have, the more numbers you have in your platform for one property, the better chance you’re going to be able to get exactly what you’re looking for because of the fact that it’s a numbers game. You can create internal competition because now you have multiple people fighting over one property or one deal.

Mitch Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. Do you ever do down payment options or anything like that?

Nick Legamaro: Well, I mean, we’re, you know, our main focus is to basically provide home ownership and we’ve tried to do that to people that can’t go out to the bank and get traditional financing. So if there’s a will, we’ll figure out a way. I mean, everything we do is completely compliant, Dodd-Frank, the whole nine yards. We close at title company, we transfer deed, the whole experience that a normal buyer would go after. The only difference is we’re the bank and we’re the seller and other than that, everything is the same. So we have the flexibility to do what we think is necessary to put that qualified borrower into that property so, you know, we have the ability to modify down payment, if that’s what you’re asking. But our minimum down payment is a minimum of 10%. But as our numbers continue to grow, going off of what you just said earlier, we’re seeing the down payment number increase because we have more buyers that are interested in a property which allows us to get more money down.

So, in effect, we’re able to get more money down, the LTD is gonna go down on the note which, in the long run, is a better overall investment if we’re selling the note or even if we’re keeping the note.

The Types of People You Should Lend to Even When the Banks Won’t

Mitch Stephen: Yeah and so, you know, some people say, well, the natural tendency for people out there that aren’t experts in the business, a big question is, you know, if the big box lenders like, you know, Wells Fargo and Chase, and all those other mortgage companies, won’t lend to these people, why do we want to lend to them?

Nick Legamaro: Well, I mean, obviously go back to … I mean, why was Dodd-Frank created? I mean, go back to ’07-’08. The banks got their hands slapped. There were a lot of notes that were written that shouldn’t have been written, a lot of deals that were done, a lot of subprime deals, a lot of stated income, that stuff. There was a problem with that. Those borrowers that have the nice, pretty jobs and have the W-2 forms that work at Frito-Lay or Pepsi Cola or, you know, Dell Computers … It’s not a matter of if they’re gonna have a bump in the road over a 30-year note, it’s just when. I mean, things have changed, jobs are no longer as secure as they used to be.

The main fundamental difference between our borrower and I what I would call the pretty borrower is that they work for themselves, they have their own businesses, they don’t have the ability to go down to go get a loan because they’re not a W-2 employee. Anybody that works for themselves or is an entrepreneur, they understand exactly what I’m talking about. It’s extremely difficult and that was what became extremely difficult as a result of what happened in ’07 and ’08 basically. Rates are extremely low. The downside risk far outweighs the upside gains that a bank can go out and lend to. So when rates are at 3 – 3 1/2 % the gain to a bank, the win is just not, it’s not great. But the risk is tremendous so they’re extremely cautious. As a matter of fact, we do a lot of research and stuff, the average declined credit score has been hovering around between 700 and 710 for the last year. So, that’s declined.

Mitch Stephen: Declined, wow.

Nick Legamaro: Last time I checked, 710’s a pretty high credit score, all things considered. The point is, that a decline doesn’t mean that they just didn’t meet all of the qualifications, their DTI was a little bit too high or their length of employment was not great.

Mitch Stephen: That’s a big one right there, length of employment. You know. A guy can be making a great living and been making a great living forever but he changed occupations and it doesn’t have a, what is it, two year minimum of being in the same genre, or the same niche, and so they decline him because he doesn’t have continuity of job history. That’s a big one.

Nick Legamaro: Well, and here’s the proof in the pudding. We can go back and look at the historical data of all the notes that we have written and to this date we have not had a default status on any of them. Now, we’ve got some slow pays and we’ve had some delays but we haven’t had to go through the default process where we had to go try to collect the property and bring it back. Which tells me two things, the borrowers that we’re underwriting and when we vet them, they’re good borrowers, it’s just they just don’t have the W-2 or they don’t have a Social Security Number.

Mitch Stephen: They don’t fit in the box. They just don’t fit in the banking box.

Nick Legamaro: They don’t fit in the box, they don’t fit in the box. And that is what we are. We’re problem solvers and just because it doesn’t fit in the box doesn’t mean they’re not a good borrower because all of the mortgages we write, seller finance, they’re still qualified mortgages. We still underwrite them and vet them no differently than Chase, Fargo, Bank of America. In fact, we stack our files against theirs all the time and when they get audited, they’re just as good, if not better, than what other people in the professional space are writing.

So, the rules that we follow are no different than anybody else’s, it’s just we have a little bit more flexibility to-

Mitch Stephen: Common sense. Did you have common sense? A government program doesn’t ever factor in common sense, it’s just strict, rigid and then you either fit or you don’t. We’re able, as the owner-financier, you’re able to make a decision as to why this person’s not fitting in the box and whether you care or not.

Nick Legamaro: That’s 100% correct and that is really the primary reason that we’re successful, because of just that statement. And secondly, is that the other thing we work very hard to do, is we make it such that homeownership is equal to or less than the cost of renting that similar property and that’s a huge, huge part of the model because if you can buy a house for $1000 a month or you can rent that same house for $1000 a month, which is in the best interest of the buyer or the person that’s gonna occupy it? Probably owning it. Regardless of what rate is and term, it’s the fact that their gonna have home ownership at some point in the future. And-

Mitch Stephen: For the same, for the same as rent, for about what they’re paying for rent plus or minus a little bit. And so, this is real important, and I want the audience to catch this. What makes the owner financed niche work, the core belief, the core belief is what Nick just said, the core belief is that the person paying $1000 rent would rather pay $1000 to own if they just knew that it was possible and I think our challenge as owner- financiers is to let the world know that there is a different choice than the one that they’ve been taught their whole life, right? That’s the challenge.

Nick Legamaro: Absolutely. And to that point, you know, like I said, we spend a lot of money and energy and resources with researching data and one thing we know is that about 80% of renters rent because they have to, not because they want to. 80%.

Mitch Stephen: No one’s giving them a chance to get in a house with a loan, right? And then you’re solving that problem.

Nick Legamaro: Either that or they don’t know it’s available. That’s probably the more thing because they’ve been told no so many times, or you can’t qualify because you don’t have this or you don’t have that when, which is true when you go down to a big box bank but it’s not true when you have the right lenders in the seller financed-

Mitch Stephen: To underwrite yourself. You’re underwriting it yourself.

Nick Legamaro: Absolutely.

How Nick Collects Phone Numbers Using Real Estate Technology

Mitch Stephen: Yeah, yeah. So I want to take the audience down through, I know there’s probably a lot of ways you do it. But take us down like the exact steps of how you’re collecting these phone numbers, say using bandit signs, or whatever.

Nick Legamaro: Right. So through the LiveComm system, you know, we’re able to, we have many, many phone numbers. That’s what’s great about it. If I need to go get another phone number I just log in, add another number to the account and I get a specific number, say I want to go market it in, you know, Mesquite, Texas and I want to know exactly what I’m getting call volume lines for Mesquite, Texas. So I can go get a dedicated phone number, put it on bandit signs, put it on advertisements or whatever it is and start collecting the data that comes in from that call. Regardless if we answer the call, or we redirect the call when that phone number is dialed, as soon as they make the connection, we’ve collected their phone number. That’s important because we don’t have to be there to answer phone calls every minute of the day and we can still collect the information and then we can turn around from there and either notify them via text message on a property that we have available, send them a link to a website, call them back, however, we choose to communicate to them, we know that they expressed an interest in something that we had to offer because they called the number and we know what the number was for.

Mitch Stephen: Now that’s critical to see what kind of market’s out there, right? I mean, if you put out 100 bandit signs in a region and you get five calls, maybe that market’s … There’s a trick to that market somewhere, something’s going on. You put up 100 bandit signs and you get 100 calls over the next seven days, you say, okay, these people are looking for houses, this would be a great place to buy houses. And do you use the recording feature or do you have someone answer the phone and tell the caller about the house live?

Nick Legamaro: We’re testing some different strategies right now. It’s always a work in progress, right? So what worked yesterday isn’t necessarily going to work tomorrow so we’re always looking to be more efficient in the process that we use. What we primarily have done is we’ve marketed to a very … We cast a very wide net, meaning we’ll market properties over the entire metroplex, for example, Dallas or Houston. Those are our two main markets. So we will just blast signs out or postings or post on Craigslist or Zillow or whatever it is about specific properties. Once we collect that data in and I can be very generic and say, you know, owner financed, three bedroom, two bath, Mesquite, call the number. Once we get that number in and we have it in our database, then we get a little bit more dialed down and we turn around and we notify them when we have a specific property available.

We don’t really market … When we collect the data initially, we don’t really market to a specific property. We’re really looking for people that are looking for owner financing and if they meet the qualifications after they hear a voice message on the system, or they go to the website, or we send them property details, then we start marketing back out to them in a more specific manner on a specific property and then from there they call back in and at that point if they have an interest is when we have somebody on our team provide them the details regarding a specific property that they may be interested in.

Mitch Stephen: Yeah, one of the signs that really works good for me and has been a great database builder, is I have a sign that says free list of owner financed homes and it says call for recording which is non-confrontational, right? And so people will call that to hear the recording, the LiveComm system grabs the number and they’re just kind of put in my generic list of people. These people are interested in a list of owner financed homes. I just tell them in the recording, you know, because you’ve called, every time I have some new house pop up in my inventory I’m gonna send you a text about it and if you ever want off this list, just click on unsubscribe and, you know, that little last line there, if you ever want off the list, just click unsubscribe, that’ll stop you from getting some angry emails or whatever from people who don’t want to be on the list. I don’t, for the life of me, can’t understand why people don’t recognize the unsubscribe button at the bottom of every text. But for some reason they don’t so I also verbalize it in my recordings.

That has been a great … You know, I assigned one specific phone number to that particular sign, exactly the way it’s worded and boy, that’s been a good list builder for me. Granted, it’s generic because they’re not telling me what part of town they want to be in or anything, but I’m really not worried about that either. Just like you. I’m not worried about where they want to be. I just want to know, are you interested in owner financing? Then they can sort through the properties and figure out where they want to be and I think that’s what you’re saying, too, when you said you cast a large net, right?

Nick Legamaro: That is correct. Initially, we catch a lot. It’s like a funnel. It’s a funnel bigger at the top than it is at the bottom. We want to throw as much stuff that fits into the funnel and then as it comes out the bottom, then we’ll sort it and then we’ll specialize and be specific on how we want to approach those qualified borrowers moving forward.

Mitch Stephen: So you’re a consummate systems guy. I had the pleasure of meeting you personally down in Cancun when … My family goes on vacation once a year and I just tell anybody who’s following Mitch Stephen or this podcast if you want to go to X resort, I’m gonna be there from this date to that date, come on down and we had about, what, 40 investors plus their wives or their girlfriends or their guests and we had between 60 and 80 people showed up, much to my surprise, and it was a blast, wasn’t it?

Nick Legamaro: Oh, we had a great time and, you know, a lot of just down time, just relaxing, taking the needed break from the business. But just good friends and good times and a lot of great ideas. It’s amazing, you know, when you get people in a room, even in a very casual environment, how powerful that is because all you have to do is say one thing and somebody may make a comment and could change your perspective and your view on something to the good in a matter of minutes on something you may have been struggling with for months or even years.

How Nick Performed in 2016

Mitch Stephen: Yeah, so, and I want to make it clear, when we hold that annual event, and we’ve been doing it now for a few years, but it’s picking up momentum. There’s no seminar, there no place to be, you’re not cooped up in a room. There’s really no agenda. We were just groups of people who would cluster at the buffet or other groups of people were clustering over at the pool bar and other people were down at the beach but everyone seemed to be kind of grouped off and everybody, you know, we just mingled around in and out of groups all the time. No specific agenda. But I can guarantee you there was probably more real estate spoken at that resort in those seven days than ever in the history of that resort because I don’t remember a lot of conversations not being about real estate.

Pretty fun stuff, too, the inside stories and getting to see the different personalities and how they work in different people’s systems, it was a great time. And I had a wonderful time talking to you, Nick, because you are a systems guy and so that to drive the point home a little further, tell the audience about how many, you know we’re coming to the end of 2016, about how many houses will you purchase and sell in the year 2016?

Nick Legamaro: So, I would say … I want to say one other thing about the Cancun experience. I’m slowly recovering from sunburn and the pruning of the fingers from being in the pool (laughter). Time well spent. But what I do want to say on this and this is what I appreciate most about that opportunity is that they were people from all walks of the real estate journey. There were newbies, there was experienced folks and it all worked out well because the people that are there that have the experience are more than willing to help the people that are just trying to get moving, the people that are just trying to get moving are asking how can I help, what can I do? It’s a commitment level but in a very casual environment and I look forward to next year already and, you know, I would not doubt if the number of attendees doubled. If we can get that much room down there, we’ll find out but, anyway, I just wanted to close on that.

Mitch Stephen: No, I appreciate it, Nick, because it was a good time and I just can’t stress enough, it wasn’t a seminar. There was no … No one was selling anything, right? I mean, we were just down there. And it was a blast.

Nick Legamaro: I didn’t buy anything but some … I don’t even think I had to buy the booze. I think that was already included, too. So I’m not sure I had to buy anything.

Mitch Stephen: No, it was all inclusive. Man, all you could eat, all you drink, and all the real estate you could talk about for seven days. It was pretty fun. And you know, there were guys down there that had a couple of thousand apartment doors and there were people down there that had mini storages and there people down there that … And then we met some strangers down there, I remember, from Florida, a couple of guys, separate, different people who were listening in our conversations from the far right or the far left and came over and joined in and so we even got to meet people that we didn’t even plan to meet down there that were talking about real estate. It was a pretty good time. I really had a great time and we’re definitely doing it again.

I’m trying to set something up in June, maybe around, what is it? Nuevo Vallarta, yeah, Nuevo Vallarta. It’s supposed to be a very, very sophisticated, high-class, all-inclusive place at a super bargain price. So we’re working on it right now.

Nick Legamaro: Excellent. Well, so go back to the original question that you asked. It was about, you know, where are we in 2016?

Mitch Stephen: Yeah, because I want people to understand the kind of volume that you’re doing so they know who they are talking to.

Nick Legamaro: You know, this year we … In 2015 we did about, I think we did 96 seller financed transactions and probably another 15 cash transactions. It’s funny, because sometimes we go in thinking we’re gonna seller finance and, you know, before we go to close the buyer comes and goes, “Hey, how much would you sell this property for cash?”, because they’ve been able to raise the capital or the cash and so some of those deals turn into cash deals. So I think last year we did about 111, I think was the number, total. We’re probably trending really close to that this year. We had a little bit of a lull probably between August and October – November, I think it was more election-driven, to be quite honest with you. People were sort of sitting on the bench to see which way it was gonna go, how it was gonna shake out.

As a result, we’ve already started picking back up. You know, the month of November was right on par. We’ve already had a few sales already for December. So I think we’re trending pretty close to, I don’t know if we’ll quite get to 100 by the end of the year of seller financed deals but it’s gonna be really really close. So we’ll probably write about 10 to 12 million dollars in paper this year.

Nick’s Owner Financing Strategy

Mitch Stephen: Wow. That’s incredible. So do you owner finance every house and I understand that some people come in and you make it cash, but do you ever just decide that this house isn’t in an area I want to owner finance? I’m just gonna wholesale it or something. Or do you owner finance everything?

Nick Legamaro: No. So, you know, there’s a lot of collateral benefit of what we do. You know, we generate a lot of leads ourselves. We go out digging for property. We always are looking for inventory. We can’t buy enough inventory for the buyers that we have that need property so we’re always looking for deals and especially in the Dallas and Houston markets that have that ARV under $130,000 to $150,000. So we’re buying from wholesalers, we’re buying off MLS, we’re buying direct from sellers. There is definitely a shortage for what our demand is internally. That said, as a result of going and looking for stuff, we’ve also built a very large database and distribution network for stuff that doesn’t meet our model. We find a lot of stuff that is …

Each property has a different exit strategy and, you know, we have to evaluate that. Is it a cash deal? Is the only exit strategy that makes sense to get rid of this is cash? Like a wholesale deal. Because it’s not worth fixing and flipping. It might be a property that needs fix and flipping and it might be something that’s a buy and hold. So there’s three distinct buckets that these houses, in my opinion, fall into; wholesale, fix and flip, buy and hold. Okay? Well we’re definitely not a buy and hold investment company, as you well know. We’ve been talking about notes for the last 30 minutes but there are a lot of buyers out there that are buy and holders and that’s great, I’m glad for them and we have properties that fit there and we can liquidate those properties through our distribution network.

Mitch Stephen: Now when he’s saying buy and hold folks, he’s talking about people that want to be landlords. So they get in a neighborhood that’s predominantly rentals, maybe it’s a rougher neighborhood. They don’t really want to owner finance it down there in that particular neighborhood because it’s just a little too rough but, believe me when I tell you, there’s always somebody down there buying those kind of houses, specializing in even that neighborhood and renting them out and that’s their forte and so you’re saying you’re able to find those kind of people when you choose to decide that this is not the kind of house I want to own or finance, right?

Nick Legamaro: That is correct and, or maybe it’s a higher dollar value house. Maybe it’s $200,00 or $300,000, that’s outdated and it’s what we call fix and flip where somebody wants to come in, buy it, fix it and sell it retail. There again, that’s not our traditional model, we don’t go after traditional buyers but there’s a lot of investors that do. Well, there again, when we find properties we want to monetize everything we can so we make them available out to the marketplace to other investors through different distribution channels, other wholesalers, and we post them on MLS, you know.

Mitch Stephen: You said the key words there. You pay out good money for those leads, right? So when a lead comes in on an eight unit apartment complex, you don’t throw that away because, you know, I don’t do apartment complexes. You don’t treat it like that. You say, okay, well here’s an apartment, I’m still gonna follow-up on it. I’m still gonna look at the numbers on this place. I’m still gonna try to get a contract, it’s a killer deal, you know, a great contract, a great price, negotiate a great price and then I’m gonna go out and find somebody who specializes in small apartment complexes and I’m gonna sell it to them for a profit, right?

So you never let a great lead go, you just pick and choose which ones you want to own or finance, which ones you want to wholesale and, in my case, sometimes I buy some houses that don’t need anything and it just screams at me, put it on MLS, let the realtor sell it, let somebody get a new loan and we’ll cash out of this thing and make 20 to $30,000 and that house just spoke to me and that’s what it needs and that’s what we’re gonna do. I think that just what you said, you got to monetize every lead.

Nick Legamaro: And you know, the other thing that we’re able to do because we have such a unique audience, we are the exception to the rule in the real estate game. There is a lot more people that are investors that are going out and looking for either wholesale properties or properties they can buy and hold and use as rentals or fix and flip. Not many of them out there are going and chasing down deals and going after seller finance which is good for me and the people that are in it because my competition level is not nearly as great and I have no problem sharing that because I personally think that’s the model that I’ve chosen so I’m gonna obviously be a little more biased in my opinion of it.

That said, I have a lot of friends that I’ve come to know that are in the real estate field that are investors that don’t have that same viewpoint that I do but that’s a great thing because we’re able to co-exist because when I have a property that fits what they want, I just give it to them. When they have a property that fits what my model is, they give it to me because neither one of us wants what the other guy is doing so it’s, you know, it’s the ability to take something and really partnering in an indirect way and make everybody, let everybody benefit as a result.

Mitch Stephen: Yeah, so, we’re talking about owner finance in the fashion to where you buy a house and then you owner finance it to your buyer and you collect the payments from them. Do you buy many houses where the seller is financing you, Nick?

Nick Legamaro: Absolutely and that’s all part of that vetting of the lead once we get it because contrary to popular belief, not all sellers want cash. I’m gonna say that again. Not all sellers want cash for their property. I’ve gotten many deals where I was able to get seller financing for little … As a matter of fact, let me give you a quick example. I just bought a house in the last six months that, I’m gonna say it was full retail. The gentleman wanted $100,000 for the house. I think it was worth maybe worth $103,000. Not much difference. However, I asked him the question. I go, “Well, what are you going to do with this money?” and he looked at me sort of weird because it was a rental property and he was like 70 years old and the tenant was gone after like eight years and he looked at me like sort of strange and go, “What do you mean?” and I go, “What are you gonna physically do with the money?”. He goes, “I don’t know, I’m probably gonna put it in the bank”. And I go, “Oh, interesting”.

I know what the banks pay, it’s not very much, it’s maybe, you know, a half a point, I don’t even know if it’s that high right now. But I questioned him, I go, “If I give you $10,000 cash today, will you sell this to me?”. He was getting $800 dollars a month. “If I give you $800 a month until the balance is paid in full, would you do the deal”? And he thought about it and he said, “Yes”. So not only did I get a $100,000 house for $10,000 down, I’m making an $800 payment until it’s paid in full on the $90,000. What’s the interest rate on that, Mitch?

Mitch Stephen: It’s a zero interest rate loan because you just divided the balance by however many … You divided it by 800 and you arrived at how many months you’re gonna have to pay him and so there’s no interest.

Nick Legamaro: So I evasively got a $90,000 loan at 0% for 112 months. Just to cut to the chase, so what I was able to do, I turned around and I sold that house for $110,000, seller financed, I got $10,000, I actually got $12,000 down on it. So I repaid myself back the $10,000 that was the down payment that I had to give to the original seller, I wrote an owner finance note and for basically equal balance of $100,000, and my interest rate was 9 1/2%.

Mitch Stephen: So you were making 9 1/2% spread on someone else’s loan because you had a 0% loan, you were charging … You were able to see the house for basically exactly what you bought it for and you recouped your down payment plus $2000 and then you just made 9% on your seller’s money and that’s a wonderful thing.

Nick Legamaro: Yep.

Mitch Stephen: And I wanted to point out to the audience, so you can pay market price for a house if you win on terms. So, you might find this interesting, Nick. The name of my house buying company, which is a horrible name for a lot of reasons, but I had started 20 years ago with this name before I had figured out what a good Internet name was, but the name of my company is Cash4Houses.net and it’s Cash, the number four, Houses, .net. And so I was trying to find a way to make that name stick with people and the number four stick instead of the phonetic, you know, spelling of the word and so I always make four offers on every house, hence my name tied it together.

I make a cash offer which is the lowest offer, I make the offer on the house that’s a little bit higher but it’s a small down payment, and then the seller gives me payments, you know, allows me to make payments to him. I make a large down payment where the seller has to finance the balance but, the trick there is, like I could put 50% down, now I offer up to 50% down but the seller is gonna finance me the other 50% but he has to subordinate to the second position so that I can borrow the 50% down and put that lender in a first loan position so that’s my third offer and my fourth offer is I can pay market price if I get to name the terms and that example would be exactly the one that you just rattled off here is yeah, you can pay market price for a house if you get a 0% interest loan or a very low percent interest loan, you know? So, I thought you might find that interesting.

I always give my buyers four choices in the hard contract that I send them and I don’t care which one they pick. Just pick one and no matter which one you pick, you know, my business gets to proliferate.

Nick Legamaro: Absolutely.

Mitch Stephen: Do you do multiple offers yourself? I’m sure you do but do you do them right up front or do you just kind of go through the offers as you read the people?

Nick Legamaro: You know, the first thing I always try to do is get the contract, get the contract, get the contract, then get the contract. Because without the contract you have no leverage on the deal because we want to control property, we don’t really want to own them, per se. Eventually we might have to own them short term but if we’re writing notes, we’re not owning the property long term, we’re just using it as a vehicle to get to our end result which is creating a note. So we write the multiple offers but it’s sort of in a secondary phase if need be because honestly we just don’t know what we’re going to do with that property. We might assume but we don’t know what the buyer is gonna … Or how they’re gonna react to it moving forward because we haven’t really spent a lot of time getting him under contract.

We haven’t gone in and done a full inspection yet or, you know, a really solid-

Mitch Stephen: So, I get it, You’re saying just get the contract. Whatever their hot point is, get it like that, then you go in and inspect the property and then when you have some time to settle down get to know your seller a little better and say, you know, there are some other options if you’d like to hear them. We can do the one that we just signed up but there are some other options if you’d like to hear the other options. They’ll almost always say yes and then sometimes you end up, you know, getting seller financing or doing it a different way but, see I can appreciate that angle, too.

Nick Legamaro: Yeah but I think there are some people that aren’t experienced and really kill a deal by giving … Look, we are experts in what we do. Most people that sell houses are not experts and they may own a house but they’re not experts in the negotiating or understanding how to sell or market their house. So as a result of that, we don’t want … My position is, I want to treat them in a very conflicted fashion and give them something they understand and what they understand is a cash transaction. They can wrap their hands around that and I want to write the best transaction for cash, the best deal I can for cash that’s a win-win for both the seller and us.

After that, there’s gonna be some time between when you write the contract and when you close. You’re gonna have questions, you’re gonna be negotiating, or you’re gonna be having conversations with the seller. “Hey, tell me again, how old is the roof” or “What do you know about the HVAC?” or whatever the case may be. You’re developing a rapport and relationship with that seller. Then at that point in time, you may say, “It makes no difference to me but have you considered this or would you like to hear about another opportunity to maybe get you some more money in the long run?”. That’s just sort of how we do it. There’s no right or wrong answer. It’s whatever you’re most comfortable with. We don’t go out changing deals to be changing them. It’s always basically based on the seller.

Seller financing and what we’re talking about is a very complex model for most people and to understand that, it’s easy for you and I because it’s what we do for a living, but I don’t want to scare somebody away at a risk of losing a deal because if the worst case is I got to take it down and buy it for cash and not get a deal done on terms, then that’s what we’ll do.

How Nick Uses Real Estate Technology to Find Motivated Sellers

Mitch Stephen: You’re absolutely right, there’s no one way to skin this cat and you have a viable point there if you have an unsophisticated person don’t confuse them, just get the contract on the simplest level and then decide if you want to give them some other options. I couldn’t agree more. I think that’s a great angle. You know, we’re talking about how you sell your houses and using technology and it was pretty simplistic. You’re using LiveComm and collecting so many hoards of numbers with the ability to mass text it. It doesn’t sound like selling the houses is a great big problem for you so let me ask you this question.

Have you figured out how to use LiveComm or any other kind of real estate technology buying these houses? Let me rephrase it. Have you figured out how to use LiveComm when you’re trying to find motivated sellers?

Nick Legamaro: Well, I mean, again, that’s sort of a work in progress, too. I don’t think we’ve cracked that code by any sense of the imagination. I think there’s so many ways to acquire properties these days with social media, whether it be Facebook or Craigslist or Zillow or wholesalers or MLS or For Sale By Owner signs or whatever the case may be. So we touch on every and anything that we can go out and find a potential seller with.

Mitch Stephen: I have one idea. I’ve had on idea and the reason why I didn’t express … I just wanted you to … I was trying to see if there’s other ideas because it’s more difficult to figure out how to use LiveComm to purchase properties but I do have one idea that I use consistently and I probably never will ever stop it because it’s proven to be valuable and this is how I’ve been using LiveComm in an effort to find motivated sellers, is I like to send out a lot of postcards to people that, the indicators point to that they have their struggles, you know, they’re having some issues somewhere.

And so I send out these postcards and I use two LiveComm numbers on the postcard. I use one that says, “To speak to a representative directly, dial this number” and the other one says, “For a free recorded message, dial this number”. Now, the reason why I put the free recorded message on there is because as soon as they call that recording, I’m gonna capture their phone number and whether it’s a landline or a cell phone, I don’t care because if it’s a landline, LiveComm will put it in the landline bucket. If it’s a cell phone, it’ll put the phone number in the text distribution list associated with that phone number but here’s what’s cool about adding that free recorded message in the additional phone number on that postcard, is imagine this.

A guy comes in at twelve o’clock after bowling league and seven beers and it’s twelve o’clock at night and his wife brought in the mail and it’s sitting there on the kitchen table and he sits down to smoke one last cigarette before he goes to bed and there he’s looking at that postcard and he decides at twelve o’clock at night to dial that free recording and bam, I got his phone number. He’s never gonna call through a live person at twelve o’clock at night after he’s been bowling and drinking. You know what I mean?

So I give it that extra chance to collect the phone number and that’s the best I’ve been able to do and if anyone else out there has any creative ideas about how to use that kind of call-capture system to proliferate your buying side of the equation, I would love to hear that. You can always contact or send in your idea at Mitch@1000houses.com. Mitch @ 1-0-0-0 Houses.com and I’ll be happy to share those ideas if anybody has a great idea that we haven’t thought about.

I’m always amazed at what the masses can come up with so I hope maybe that’ll give us an extra little tip there, huh, Nick?

Nick Legamaro: Hey, I’m always looking for new ideas, that is for sure.

Mitch Stephen: I would like to hear, right before we close out, is there a way, is your organization in poster fashion that you could kind of describe the different people you have sitting in different chairs to do the kind of volume that you do? Do you have like a little tree in your head that you could tell us about?

Nick Legamaro: Well, so we have a … It’s a fairly small company. It’s extremely lean. We try to capitalize on systems more than people whenever possible. So we have a small team. We have a marketing team that’s made up of five or six individuals that actually market our inventory to perspective buyers and show them the properties and they do that and then moving backwards, we have an acquisitions manager which was primarily me up to this point in time that basically goes out and forces inventory and the way that’s done is through wholesalers or direct from seller either through direct mail or outbound phone calls or any other source of lead generation we can come up with, along with MLS. We do quite a bit of business off MLS as well because that’s where people that are motivated sell, contrary to popular belief, that you can’t buy anything worth anything on MLS.

I would say, look at what we’ve done the last three years and my point is, isn’t that exactly what a motivated seller is? Somebody that’s posting on MLS? Last time I checked it was. So, we were dealing with that. Now the downside is you’re dealing with the middleman which is the realtor. So we have an acquisition side of it and then, you know, there’s all the other systems stuff and then on the disposition side, on the note side, we have our team that goes out and actively forces out potential note buyers to help us on the liquidation of the notes but also on the raising of capital, too. Because what we do takes capital, obviously. And for us to be able to continue to grow at the rate that we’re growing, we need external help, we need partners that understand our model that have the financial capacity to fund our efforts and want to materially participate in the outcome.

Mitch Stephen: So, how many office personnel do you have, you know, sitting at desks in your office?

Nick Legamaro: I think there’s a total of seven of us right now. We’re in the process of hiring a couple of more as we continue to grow. We just started going into Houston third quarter of this year so we have three people down in the Houston area right now that’ll continue to grow. Based on what we do and how we do it and how we leverage, the efforts of title companies or underwriters or individuals, we can run a pretty successful business with a fairly small head count of anywhere between five and ten people in any given market.

How Nick Structured His Business

Mitch Stephen: See, I’ve always been afraid of creating a large overhead that I have to run like a hamster wheel, like a hamster on a hamster wheel, you know? So, one of things that I’m the most fearful of, and I have been for a long time, was employees that count on me during the good times and the bad times to still have a job and through the ups and the downs of a business. Now, I’ve learned to level out my business because I picked this strategy of owner financing which runs … It runs in a straight line right through the peaks and valleys of the economy. It stays constant. In fact, in the last graph that we did, we actually picked up and did more business during the recession than we were doing during the good times so that was a wonderful dynamic about the owner finance strategy since we’ve taken the banks out of the equation. And it’s usually the banks that hold us up in the recessions that kill us, that normally cause a business to dip.

We start going up because we’re the ones offering the financing when no one else is. So in the effort not to get myself on that hamster wheel with employees though, that fear still lingers in the back of my head. I tried to set up my system with as many subcontractors, i.e. people that get paid upon our success. So I only have one person in my organization that gets a paycheck, you know. The rest of everybody is tied to the success and they get paid when I get paid. How do you look at your business and how many employees do you have versus, you know, paid upon success teammates?

Nick Legamaro: Well, when you put it that way we have zero employees. We have people that materially participate in the business and their performance and the result of their efforts is how they’re compensated. It’s just that simple. We are strictly a pay for performance company, period.

Mitch Stephen: I had a feeling that was the case but I wanted to make sure because a lot of people out there, when you start talking about, well I have seven people working for me, or ten people working for me, they are seeing employees and that’s a very, sometimes a very scary thought, you know? Because now you got employee manuals and you have to have an HR service and you got to pay matching taxes and Social Security and have a payroll team and so I wanted to drag this out of you. You really don’t have employees working for you, you have a team and everyone is tapped into the bottom line and they all get paid when you get paid. Right?

Nick Legamaro: That is 100% correct at this time. That could change in the future if we continue to grow. We may have to add employees per se but ideally this business is … That’s the beauty of real estate in general, is that you can leverage almost the entire process. You can leverage the acquisition side with realtors and let them do all the heavy lifting and get paid from the seller, that’s how they get paid the commission as the buyer’s agent fee. The title company gets paid when they do all the closings because that’s part of the closing costs. You know, all those fees and everything can be outsourced in an indirect fashion because they’re all part of the deal.

You don’t have to do your own underwriting, you don’t have to do your own title work, you don’t have to do your own acquisition. There’s people that can do that for you and they get paid on performance based on getting the deal done.

Mitch Stephen: See that. And so I’m gonna ask. There’s a lot of things that you can delegate right off the bat. Now I don’t suppose you delegate this department but I’m gonna ask anyway. Do you use a third party note servicing company to take that off your hands or do you have such volume that it’s beneficial to have it in house?

Nick Legamaro: I absolutely do. We outsource as much as we physically possibly can and the reason being is because we don’t want to get into chasing the shiny object, per se. We know what we do well and we’re gonna do what we do well as long as we can continue to do it and our focus is very clear, our objective, is to find, fix and sell properties and owner finance them. Just that simple. If it doesn’t fit in that box, we don’t materially participate in it. We outsource it.

Mitch Stephen: Okay. Who do you use as your collection service?

Nick Legamaro: So I use August REI out of Garland, Texas. Amy Sayre is the person that is the owner of that company. She probably manages, I don’t know, a thousand notes maybe, maybe more, for investors all across the country.

Mitch Stephen: I’ve heard good things about August REI.

Nick Legamaro: What I like about them is, as you know, and I don’t know how many people listening understand this, is that, you know, tax and insurance are required to be escrowed at this time, at least for the first year. So, you know, it’s really nice to have a mortgage servicing company be able to take that taxes and insurance and escrow it and at the end of the year pay it on behalf of the borrower where you don’t have to manage that aspect of the business where you don’t have to go and pay the tax bills or the insurance bill but what the other values that they bring to the table, which I think is important for what we do is that they report that payment to the credit bureau and that’s important because if I’m an investor that’s looking at a note, possibly to purchase and I know that that borrower is getting that payment reported, I think that adds value to what we do because ultimately we’re all about helping people. Whether they go and refinance in the future or not is irrelevant.

What we’re trying to do is help give people a hand to help them up, not a hand out and if that helps them get their credit established and that helps them be able to better themselves in the future as a result of establishing, there’s nothing better than a positive credit reporting on a home purchase. There’s nothing more powerful and beneficial from a personal credit perspective. And that’s what I appreciate the most of what they do, honestly.

Mitch Stephen: It’s very difficult to get that reporting status as an individual company with less than a huge amount of notes. You know what I mean? You really have to have some real volume to get that reporting and also another way to delegate out some menial tasks or some … Not menial, because they’re not menial. But, what’s the word? Redundant tasks is through virtual assistants. Do you use any virtual assistants?

Nick Legamaro: We do. We have probably three or four virtual assistants that basically manage a lot of the administrative tasks of what we do.

Mitch Stephen: Are they local or from the US or are they overseas?

Nick Legamaro: No. They’re overseas. They’re based out of the country.

Mitch Stephen: Yeah. And they have a little bit different pay scale, don’t they? Lower.

Nick Legamaro: A little bit. I would say so. But they also, they’re also very motivated to work, they’re very hard workers, they follow directions very accurately. They’re very entrepreneurial in nature, meaning you give them a task, they’ll figure out how to solve the problem and it’s just stuff, managing files. You know, as you know, there can be literally 100 pages in a file when we go to sell a property owner finance, you know, between the application and the underwriting and the insurance and the closing documents and the disclosures, the loan documents, everything that goes as part of the contract. That all has to be managed and all that stuff has to be stacked in the file and make sure that it’s all accurately collected so that we have a complete file and we’re compliant in what we do.

Mitch Stephen: Yeah, being able to sleep at night is a big thing, isn’t it?

Nick Legamaro: It’s the biggest thing, actually.

Mitch Stephen: Yeah, you want to be in order. Well, those of y’all that are interested in making contact with Nick Legamaro, if you want to buy a note or sell a note or maybe you have some money lying around you’d like to get a rate of return, go to 1000houses.com/sold, that’s s-o-l-d all lower case. Nick, I don’t want to take your whole day but we could probably sit and talk til the cows come home but, you know, I just want to tell you it’s a pleasure talking with you. Thanks for being so transparent in giving your honest opinion to our audience and giving us a little insight behind the curtain of what goes on in a company that’s buying just around 100 houses a year and owner finance them, or other. And just want to thank you, my friend, from the bottom of my heart for being so transparent.

Nick Legamaro: Well, I greatly appreciated the time, Mitch, and everything you’ve done for me personally and the company and for others, in general. So, keep on keepin on, as they say, and I look forward to talking with you soon.

Mitch Stephen: Yep, and I’ll let you know when we got that next vacation scheduled because I certainly want you to come. You were a big asset out there and people really liked tapping your brain because you have a very big brain. It’s always fun to talk to the smart movers and shakers and see what they’re up to and how they’re doing it.

Alright, you guys. This is Mitch Stephen, The Real Estate Investor Summit podcast, and we’re outta here!

You’ve been listening to the owner financing master, Mitch “Be the Bank” Stephen on the Real Estate Investor Summit podcast. Let us now blatantly, and without apology, drive you towards financial freedom by offering you a whole bunch of free stuff. Go to 1000Houses.com and getcha some and y’all come back now, ya hear?