71: What Grinds My Gears

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Show Notes

This vlog, Danny talks about the difficulties that running a real estate investing business can cause, like attorneys talking sellers out of deals. Don’t forget, all of the vlog episodes (and more) are available on the FlippingJunkie YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/FlippingJunkie.

You know what really grinds my gears? Attorneys. And thieves (but we’ll talk about that second).

Do you ever run into issues with attorneys? For the most part, they’re not too much of an issue, but when they start making sellers or buyers question the deal it gets a little frustrating. For example, the attorney mentioned in the vlog wrote the buyer’s contract in such a way that it, basically, made the contract null. Just a little frustration.

Ok, those thieves. Long story short, our entire website got copied and pasted. Word for word, code for code. Understandably, Danny wasn’t happy. But, after taking a step back and looking at how poorly this is being taken care of, these thieves aren’t as intimidating as they think they are. We won’t get too much into it here. Just know that if Danny isn’t worried, no one else needs to be!

 

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Episode Transcription

Danny Johnson: This is the Flipping Junkie podcast episode 71. [music] Welcome to the Flipping Junkie podcast. My name is Danny Johnson; former software developer turned house flipper, flipping hundreds of houses. Each week, we bring you interviews, strategies, stories, and motivation to help you get started flipping houses and on your way to becoming your own boss and achieving financial freedom. Thanks for spending time with me today. Now, let’s get to it.

All right. Hey! Welcome back to the Flipping Junkie podcast. Danny Johnson of Flipping Junkie. I’m headed back to the office. We’ve got some closings happening at 4:00 and the nice thing is when you’re doing a lot of deals, the title company will come to you. So, I don’t have to go to them. They come to our office, we get everything closed up, so it’s very nice.

But I’ve got two things today I wanted to talk about, basically really kind of grinding my gears. I don’t know if you got anything that grinds your gears, I’m sure you do. But two of them for me are basically attorneys getting in the middle of a deal and then another one is about Lead Propeller and a guy that wanted to buy into it and partner up and buy into it and it ended up basically ripping it off, trying to rip it off. So that’s a funny story and I’ll share that today too.

But the first one is that the attorney is getting in the middle. So basically we’ve got a deal and the husband basically was going for it and wanted to sell to us and everything. Well, he ended up taking the contract and going to his attorney, and the attorney basically told him to ask for all these things. So basically, you know, when people have an attorney look over a contract, I have no problem with that first of all. We always tell the sellers, “Yeah, go ahead.” You’ve got to be comfortable with it. You can’t tell them to not have their attorney look it over. But I usually do preface it by saying when you pay an attorney to do that, they’re going to try find things to say because they don’t want to just tell you, “Well, there’s nothing. This is fine.” You’re paying them to find a bunch of stuff. So what are they going to do? They’re going to nitpick and find a bunch of things. And so we’ve kind of had that happen on this one where they ask for a lot more earnest money and that’s okay, I’m okay with doing a lot more earnest money. But then the attorney had told the seller to have us add a statement into the contract that says that it’s basically just an attempt to purchase and that until a real estate contract assigned there’s not valid agreement and it’s null and void, and it’s like, why the heck would we ever put that into a contract? It’s basically saying that the contract is worthless and there’s no reason to even have that document. It’s just crazy to me. It’s so stupid and I don’t really understand the thinking behind that.

Now, we do use a single page contract purchase agreement and we bought hundreds of houses with this. And so, you know, I’m assuming he’s saying to use a TREC contract which is the Texas Real Estate Commission contract. So what I’ve advised my acquisitions person to do is basically tell them, to tell the seller that we’re happy to pay more earnest money, that’s fine. But the other statements in here basically are negating the whole contract, and that’s the contract that we use. We’re not agents. We’re not real estate agents. We’re investors. We buy houses, we’re ready to buy your hose. We close it quickly and solve your problem, and we don’t need a 10-page contract that’s 10 pages because it’s full of cover-your-butt stuff for realtors. And so we just tell them, “Hey, we’re happy to pay more earnest money, it’s great. We will buy your house. We have 100% close rate. We buy all the houses that we put under contract. And if you want to move forward, let’s do that.” So I haven’t heard back. I’m sure that they’ll go ahead and take it. But, you know, it’s just one of those things when you get an attorney involved. And there’s a couple of other nitpicky things that they wanted to add in. It’s just stupid, it’s crazy. So that’s one thing.

The second thing was, and I almost hesitated to even talk about this, and at first when I found out I was pretty upset about it and wanted to charge full ahead and do all kinds of things. If you can see in the video, this is my green smoothie. I got some banana bread, I love banana bread and my green smoothie. But anyway, so I was at a conference last week and I get a Slack message from my CTO for the software stuff and he says “Check out this website. They’ve completely ripped off Lead Propeller.” And I’m thinking, oh well, maybe it’s like a new competitor or something, right? Well I go to this website and he’s not kidding. Like the whole sales page for Lead Propeller, it’s the exact one with a different name and it’s like they just started doing it, so it’s still like the exact, they just copied all of the HTML and everything and put up another website, and then changed the copyright at the bottom to be their company name, which is insane. It’s like completely ripping off copyrighted material and putting like their own company name on it and then changing around. You know, so at first I’m like, “Whoa! This is incredible that somebody would do this.” And after thinking about it a little bit though, the more and more I realized, like let this person – and I know who it is by the way and I’m not going to mention who it is. But let this person waste their money having a developer that doesn’t know what he’s doing. Take this stuff and try to build out their own thing and get nowhere with it, let him spin his wheels and never amount to anything but a black voice they’re throwing money into.

And so that’s basically a strategy I’m going to get, you know, I’m employing here. And I’m also not going to mention the website because I don’t want a bunch of traffic being sent there and then having that sort of improved their rankings because a bunch of traffic is going. But it’s a complete rip-off and I’ve taken pictures of it. And it’s just incredible that somebody, for me, first of all it’s like if you want to do like the same thing and you want to compete, like where’s the sense in hiring a developer out of India and saying, “Hey, copy this entire website the exact way it is.” And I’m assuming what they’re going to do is maybe change it up a little bit. But it’s like, if you don’t even have the skills to create your own, like how far are you going to be able to take that anyway? Besides, the whole backend part of it, it is not going to be able to be copyable. So, good luck with that. You probably haven’t even thought that far ahead. So it’s just insane that somebody would actually take a complete freaking copy like literally they must have viewed source and scrolled and copy the whole thing and then paste it as their own thing and then changed the copyright on the bottom and then the name of the website at the top. It’s freaking insane.

So I’m sort of enjoying watching like the fumblings of this. Even all the testimonials are the same. It’s just crazy. And so, where this stems from though is somebody wanting to buy into it and, you know, they had communicated with me before and the person had offered these things and saying that I’d be able to get this fancy car and all this kind of stuff. And completely the type of person that I don’t want to partner with and like they don’t understand me, what drives me. Right? So I didn’t entertain any of it. We know what we’re doing. We got our mission and we’re playing the long game. This is the long game and we had something like we’ve been working on flipping houses for 14 years and in the software we’ve been working for at least, what, six years, five or six years, REI Mobile and then Lead Propeller for the last 2 to 3 years. And it’s been the long game. Like we’ve wanted so much from putting this out there, building it up, putting it out there, testing things, doing things. And for someone to think that they can just go in and copy the sales page and be able to set up something similar from somebody in India to code this up for them whose English is horrible because I’ve seen the changes and the English is really bad. And there’s nothing against people from India, I’m not saying that but what I’m saying is like somebody thinking that they could just quickly do that and having success from it is insane. And really, the fact of the matter is, like everybody’s got ideas. So many people, so many thousands of investors have ideas to do things and the reason why we don’t see thousands of products out there or thousands of things about it is because it’s all about execution and how difficult it is and how much work involved for the long term it is to get even as far as we’ve got is just a lot more than people realize, I think. And so, to see this is kind of laughable. But I wanted to share that out there with you guys. We’ve got something that other people desire and everything and think that they can take a shortcut and do that. It’s just laughable.

So anyway, those are a couple of things that grind my gears but I’ve got my smoothie, my banana bread making it all better. So that’s that. If you’ve got stories about attorneys messing up deals or people ripping off stuff of yours, share them in the comments. You can go to the Flipping Junkie blog to the podcast episode, share the comments there or just on Youtube.com/flippingjunkie for this video and then leave comments. I’d like to hear what you guys have to say. But thanks a lot for listening, everybody, and be sure to subscribe on iTunes for the podcast and Youtube.com/flippingjunkie for the Youtube channel. All right. Talk to you next time.