Chance Housos
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Show NotesChance started getting serious about real estate around 2 years ago. He did 16 flips last year and has been doing 2-3 a month this year. He gets around 30% of his deals through wholesalers and market for the others.
Chance and Danny were talking at the Mastermind class about deal sources and where their deals come from. Chance had mentioned to Danny that about 30% of his deals were coming from other wholesalers, which is amazing! Let’s see how he’s working these relationships to keep that percentage up.
Chance got started in real estate investing when he bought a house from his mother in 2008 / 2009. A subject 2 property (even though he didn’t know what that meant at the time), turned into his first house he took over. It needed the work to get it to market value, but Chance lived in it for a few years. When he decided to sell it in 20013, he ended up making a profit for roughly $50k with little work put into the house. When he moved, he told his wife, “We have to get into real estate!” And that’s how it started!
The benefit of working with wholesalers came around by networking as much as possible. Meeting anyone in the business opened doors and opportunities to connect with active investors who have profitable deals for flippers and rehabbers. There were always wholesalers who were more reliable than others, but it’s all about making quick decisions to get the deals done. Chance spent his time networking with other investors to grow his business.
Other than just networking with other investors, you can talk to homeowners and business owners to get your name out. When it comes to bandit signs, as long as you’re in communication with them, they tend to be ok with you posting your sign in their yard. For example, offer to pay their water bill for the month to keep your sign in their yard if it’s near a busy road. It’s something simple to get your business’s name out there and expose you to other investors.
The deals that are coming to Chance, as of now, are coming from Facebook groups (Mastermind, Flip Pilot, etc), mailing lists, and networking. Mailing lists tend to be for lower experienced buyers who are willing to spend more and make a little less. As far as the work that Chance does, the majority of mailing lists that come to him tend to not have the deals he’s looking for, but there’s always the occasional solid lead.
IFTTT.com (If This Then That) is a great place to look for the best keywords to search on sites like Craigslist and Backpage. Chance looks for “fixer upper”, “rehab”, “ARV”, “vacant house”, “motivated seller”, and finds a good amount of leads. IFTTT.com is a great place to set up ‘recipes’ to look for Craigslist queries to see which keywords you should be searching to find the best leads online. If you’re interested in hunting for leads from your desk, this is definitely a place to start.
Chance’s focus for the future is leaning toward sourcing their own deals. Their ability to source their own has grown, and in order to turn the dial up and flip more properties, the best option is to work for themselves and find more deals. As long as there’s someone to do the busy work and go to those properties, it’s very manageable.
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Episode TranscriptionWelcome to The Flipping Junkie Podcast, the podcast for flip pilots everywhere. Flip pilots are the house flippers that work more on our business instead of in our business by keeping the 30,000-foot view. You’re now part of this small group of house flippers that consider themselves flip pilots. Let’s strive to build a life of financial freedom and time freedom, so that we can spend more time doing what we low with who we love. In this podcast, I give you a glimpse of the daily life of a flip pilot. So let’s get started.
Hey everybody, welcome back to the Flipping Junkie podcast. I got another great episode today I’m excited to do with my friend Chance. He lives up in Dallas. We’re down here in San Antonio, so we’re not that far away, but I met chance at a mastermind group and it turns out we were actually went to the same high school, so that was kind of cool. But real quick before we get into the episode what I wanted to do was just share with you real quick the Flip Pilot Facebook group that we’ve created for investors that want to spend more time with other investors interested in maintaining a 30,000-foot view of their business and growing their business as a real business that gives them true freedom, so that they can do the things that they want to do. To get into that private Facebook group you can get an invite at flippilot.com. Go to flippilot.com to get that invite for the group and you’ll be given directions to enter that group and if you’ve got questions for the group, by all means, everybody has been super helpful. It’s been a great community and if you’ve got a specific question you’d like for me to answer on a podcast episode, I started doing these Just Ask podcast episodes and you can just write the question in there and hashtag just ask and I’ll take a look at that you’ll get answers from other people in the group I’m sure and then I’ll record a video and a podcast episode to answer that question, so I can answer the question in great detail. Now if it’s a quick question that can be answered with a couple of words, obviously it’ll just be something we answer in the group and I wouldn’t record a whole episode about it, but if you’ve got a question that you’ve not found an answer for out there, by all means, join that group and share in there and I look forward to answering it in a video and a podcast episode for this Flipping Junkie podcast. Thanks for listening. Let’s talk to chance and find out how he gets 30% of his deals from other wholesalers and how he’s building those relationships and doing that.
Danny Johnson: Hey Chance, thanks for being on the show.
Chance Housos: Hey Danny, what’s going on?
Danny Johnson: Not much just getting ready for hurricane Harvey. It’s supposed to make landfall today I think. I think it already – we’ll know maybe later tonight or something but everybody’s like bought all the water and everything, so it’s sold out everywhere even up here in San Antonio it’s like sold out. I want to get some and the shelves were completely bare where the water was, so I was like “Well, I can’t get water, so I guess I’ll get beer and make sure at least I have beer.”
Chance Housos: You can survive off that for a while.
Danny Johnson: Right. I don’t know. I don’t know what the kids are going to drink, but we’re in a small community and we have a – the water it’s like a mile from my house and it’s all gravity I don’t feel like we’re going to have a problem. It’s a small community. I’m not on a well or anything.
Chance Housos: I don’t really think it’s going to get as bad as they’re expecting down there.
Danny Johnson: I guess it’s the problem of it stalling out and just dumping all that rain, so it’s like 13 inches expected here I think.
Chance Housos: That’s a lot of rain though.
Danny Johnson: Yeah, so we’ll see what happens. But you’re up there in Dallas right?
Chance Housos: Yeah. We’re up in Dallas. I don’t think we’re going to get quite as bad as you guys, so we’re pretty lucky I guess.
Danny Johnson: Yeah. Well, they were telling people, I was watching the weather channel, and they were telling people if you’re looking to evacuate and you’re going to Austin, it’s probably not far enough you need to go into Dallas. It’s like wow, they really think that it’s going to be pretty bad, so we’ll see. But anyway I wanted to share with you, at least the power’s not out yet we could do our podcast, that’s what’s important. We can do this podcast.
Chance Housos: Yeah.
Danny Johnson: I’ve been looking forward to doing the podcast since we both talked at the mastermind meeting about a month ago, was it a month or two months now?
Chance Housos: Maybe a little over a month. Yeah. Middle of last month.
Danny Johnson: So I was talking to chance and we’re talking about deals sources like how he’s getting deals and he was talking about how over 30% of your deals are coming from other wholesalers right?
Chance Housos: Yeah.
Danny Johnson: So that was pretty cool and I wanted to find out how he’s working those relationships and how he does that because the assumption I think a lot of people have and that I’ve always had was well wholesalers want to get the highest they can for the deals and I can’t buy cheap enough to make it a good deal for me from my wholesaler. And so I hope to debunk that with what Chance has to say today. But do you want to start with your story how you got started in real estate, how long you’ve been doing it and just share with the audience your background.
Chance Housos: Yeah absolutely. So I guess I took over a house from my mom back in 2008/2009 “subject to” even though I didn’t have a clue what “subject to” was at the time.
Danny Johnson: So I had the idea to do “subject to” then?
Chance Housos: Well, I just kind of took over. It wasn’t r legally done the way it was supposed to. She wanted to move into San Antonio and I was living up in New Braunfels at the time, so I took over the house there in New Braunfels and it needed a lot of work though. I took it over from her, lived in it for a few years, did a bunch of work to it and then I got a job offer to move up to Dallas and we ended up selling the house and I made a lot of money. I think I made $40-$50,000 off of the house and that was back in 2013 and that’s kind of what got me hooked and I moved up here started running this other company and the whole time I was up here I was kind of like we needed to do something in real estate. I got the bug at that point I guess in sales. This is where we need to be. We just made $50,000 and we just put a little bit of work into that house and so I started looking.
Danny Johnson: Okay, so you put work into it because I was going to ask didn’t your mom did any of that? You had to do some work to the place.
Chance Housos: We replaced the siding, the flooring, we painted it. We did not a lot but I lived in it for a few years too. So when I bought it from her it needed work and I bought it for pretty much what she thought it was worth and so with depreciation everything she didn’t want it. She sold it me and that was the deal. So it worked out well for us. Anyways, fast forward up I’m in Dallas, I’m hooked. I’m doing a bunch of research from all over – Bigger Pockets, I think I started following you early on when you started putting your podcast out with Justin Williams and then I ended up meeting my business partner now and he owned a rental property here and in 2014 we’ve partnered up and started flipping property together.
Danny Johnson: Awesome. So how did you guys meet? How did you meet your partner?
Chance Housos: There was a get together at one of our mutual friends’ houses and we both met and he talking about real estate and one thing led to another and we started becoming friends and both kept and then we decided to go into business together. I guess it was the summer of 2015 when we started and decided to actually take this thing on. We bought our first house together in August of 2015 and we rehabbed that one and we did okay on it and then from there we just took off running. We did about 16 last year and this year we’ve been doing on average about two a month.
Danny Johnson: Nice. That’s pretty quick ramp up to from – that’s only been two years then, right? Total?
Chance Housos: Yeah, it’s been two years.
Danny Johnson: Wow. So how did you guys educate yourself when you got started and getting going and ramping up because sounds like you’ve ramped up pretty quick. You had a good plan and how did you get the ramp up to do, would you 16 the first year?
Chance Housos: Yeah we did 16. I mean a lot of it was trial and error. Like I said, we followed you. We listened a lot of your stuff, a lot of other podcasts online. I’m kind of a podcast junkie when it comes to that. I mean we didn’t have any coaching. We didn’t do anything as far as that goes. I never really cut into any of that up until I joined the mastermind group that we’re part of.
Danny Johnson: Man and that’s kind to take guys even to the next level. But when did you start seeing the benefit of working with buying deals from wholesalers? How did that come about that you saw it in a way that would be beneficial instead of being like too hard to do because they are trying to make as much as they can and you try to find some with meat still on the bone, so how did it come about that you started working with buying deals from wholesalers?
Chance Housos: I just started networking as much as I could just to try to meet anybody that was doing anything in a business that had interests with me. I mean, obviously there is a bunch of wholesalers out there that they sell deals that wouldn’t be profitable for a flipper at least of our scale. They sell to a lot of landlord buyers, but there were a few out there that that really took the relationship more seriously than others. They would rather have a buyer that they can send a text message to that says, “Hey, I just put the house under contract this morning. If you go look at it at lunchtime and you can you can have it.” And just making the decisions with them is really what built their relationship with them and us.
Danny Johnson: Okay, so how did you start finding these wholesalers that you started working with and can you classify the type of wholesale that you find? Well, let’s just start with how you find the ones that you work with.
Chance Housos: I’ve found a few just through the network meetup groups. A lot of, at least up here in Dallas, there’s a lot of lending groups that will do networking parties – not really parties but people treat them like parties. They supply drinks and appetizers and everybody comes out and you can meet a lot of wholesalers there. Especially there’s a lot of new guys that get into the business and that’s what everybody has to do is go to those meetings and that’s I guess why and then Facebook. I really found a lot of people through Facebook especially this year of being part of the real estate investment groups. A new wholesaler will put his deal out and if you can respond quickly on Facebook you can start building that relationship, started having a conversation and go out look at the properties, make quick decisions just by talking to them on Facebook. There’s a couple of guys that I’ve never actually met in person, touched on the phone a few times that we’ve bought a couple of properties from.
Danny Johnson: Great. So it’s all about speed then in responding and being the first people to reach out because that’s who wholesalers want to work with, right? The guys that are going to e responsive and get out there and let them know whether you can or cannot do the deal. How do you get to be super responsive in those groups? Do you just pay attention to notifications from Facebook when people post in the group and is it local to Dallas or –
Chance Housos: Yeah, there’s probably 10 or 15 different groups in Dallas that are just real estate investment groups, all named almost the exact same thing and I’d probably look at those every couple hours. I have them all on my notifications where somebody put something out and then I have a spreadsheet that I use kind of to do like quick and dirty numbers on it as far as rehab costs because once you’ve done a few of these, and I’m sure you have something similar, you can almost break it down into square foot as far as depending on what part of town it is, the cost of rehab. I mean, you know what it’s going to cost to redo the flooring, the paint, the roof all that type of stuff, at least the major stuff.
Danny Johnson: Yeah. So you can determine pretty quickly whether it’s something that you would be interested or not based on what they post.
Chance Housos: Right. I can almost look at pictures and make an offer. I just really need to walk it to make sure the foundation isn’t like a roller coaster.
Danny Johnson: Yeah. How often are you seeing these deals being posted and then how often or what percentage of those do you feel like are ever worth going actually to walk? Just have a rough idea, I’m sure it varies but—
Chance Housos: I probably see five or six different posts the day on these groups and I may walk three or four of them a month just because most of the deals either they are, like you said, that asking more money than it’s worth it for me or it’s just somewhere I don’t want to be too far out, too far away from us. We started narrowing in as we’ve gotten better at finding deals and networking. We started dialing in exactly kind of the areas that we prefer to work in versus being all over the spectrum with DFW, so that we get a lot of deals for us as well. It makes a lot easier to become more of an expert in the area that you want to work.
Danny Johnson: Right. Yes that’s a pretty incredible reading four or five a day and then walking would you say like three or four a month and it’s really just a numbers game right and then you may be getting one of those every month or every other month that you’re actually putting under contract.
Chance Housos: Yeah. You know there are a few guys that are paying attention to their stuff that they’ve put out. Those are the guys that you build relationships with where they don’t even put it on Facebook before they send a text message out. There’s one wholesaler here in Dallas that went over a contract on a few properties with and he only has a pocketful for buyers, but he sells all of his deals quickly. So it keeps them moving forward. I mean every single penny out of every deal it’s going to take time versus just keeping the wheels turning and moving forward.
Danny Johnson: Right. So yeah helping them sell them quickly, so they’re not having to find the perfect buyer to get the price that they want to get. Do anything special or have you any sort of process to try to build the relationships with these wholesalers that you feel are putting up good properties, good deals with meat still on the bone?
Chance Housos: I’m sorry what was that?
Danny Johnson: Do you have a process or anything where you try to build a relationship like you see that somebody is posting some pretty decent deals and so you maybe message them and say, “Hey, you want to go to lunch or coffee or something?” Do you do anything like that or you just work the deals as soon as they post them and then start talking to them?
Chance Housos: Yeah, usually. I just work the deal right away. And then from there I always work on building that relationship because just like anybody else has been doing this for a while, there are so many new people getting and every day that unless somebody proves that they’re serious, most people won’t give you the time of day to actually do anything. A lot of people don’t want to meet up with somebody that’s not going to take action and just waste time.
Danny Johnson: Right. So kind of prove yourself first and then you know talk with them more and just kind of naturally build that relationship.
Chance Housos: Right. Yeah exactly. Take action first and then you can nurture that relationship from there.
Danny Johnson: Is there anything that new special with trying to get them to send you the deals first before anybody else even if they do have a small list to try to give you the beneficial treatment?
Chance Housos: Besides for being super quick to pull the trigger on something that’s about the only thing and being pretty area specific now is probably the other thing. Quick to pull the trigger though is probably the best. That’s the best way to do it as far as almost any way we get our deals and that’s been the most beneficial. Having a rough and dirty number of what my rehab is going to cost right off the bat makes it really easy to run comps and decide if I can do the deal or not.
Danny Johnson: Okay, yes. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense just being real quick about it. Do you make a note of who you’ve spoken to and you’ve seen some deals from and kind of reach out to them on a regular basis to try to stay top of mind, so that when they do have another deal they’re going to have more likely chance to call you or maybe they’ve got one cooking and they don’t maybe have the ink drying on the contract and you happened to call and say, “Hey, you got anything coming up?” And then they end up giving you – do you do anything like that?
Chance Housos: I would say just a lot of interaction on Facebook. We’re friends on Facebook. We follow each other a lot and just keeping up with them commenting with what’s going on in their day to day life and then just having small conversations throughout the month. That’s really what I found to work the best. I mean you just whenever you just try to be the guy whenever they think I need to pull a trigger on this, but you’re the first guy they think of. If that makes any sense at all.
Danny Johnson: Do you do anything with them with helping them analyze the deals or do anything with newer wholesalers that are trying to get into it that maybe have some leads coming in, but they’re not sure how to take those down and you offer your help in determining what you would be willing to pay for it, so that they can try to get something? You know, make an offer that’s lower to pocket the difference?
Chance Housos: Yeah absolutely. I offer myself up to pretty much anybody that’s new. If they’re willing to take action and try to do something even before they put it under contract, I can let them know what I would pay for it. Just like you said, they can work backwards. I do that often. Unfortunately you offer your knowledge out to people and they don’t take action on it, so now I kind of require them to take some sort of action before I will try to nurture them and help them learn.
Danny Johnson: Yeah, makes sense. What kind of action do you do you try to make people take to show that they’re serious?
Chance Housos: I mean one of the easiest thing and what I do is I tell them look go put out 100 bandit signs, put out twenty five a week and you’re going to get at least a few phone calls from there. I don’t care what anybody says, bandit signs work and people use them all over.
Danny Johnson: They are illegal in a lot of places, so make sure that you know that if you’re putting them out. I’m just going to give that disclaimer.
Chance Housos: Yeah, that’s true. There are crafty ways to do that as far as you can talk to a homeowner that lives on the corner of a street and even going up, to get your bandit sign to stay longer, you can go up and ask them, “Hey, if I pay your water bill, if I give you $20 bucks, can I put my sign on your yard for this month?” There’s a few creative ways to get your signs out without actually breaking the law.
Danny Johnson: I like that. I’ve never heard of that one. I always thought to find the ones where the backyard has a fence along a busy intersection and talking to them about putting it on there, but I think there’s usually some laws against that too. So yeah, I’ve never heard that one with about paying – I liked that, it was something like paying the water bill because even if it’s like really low it sounds better than let me give you $20 bucks.
Chance Housos: Right.
Danny Johnson: Yeah I like that. I might have to try that one.
Chance Housos: Yes. If you can be a little bit creative as far as trying to get your stuff out, that’s one of the way that I like to do it though. It’s helpful and it keeps people from ripping your signs down and throwing them away hours after you put it up there.
Danny Johnson: Oh yeah for sure. And then, so you want to make sure that they’re actually going to do something with the knowledge that you’re going to – because you’re taking your time and your valuable knowledge that you’ve earned for the last several years doing this. You know that a lot of people charge you know $2,000-$5,000 dollars to learn in helping wholesalers with that experience and you just want to make sure that they’re going to actually go and do something so you give them a simple task to prove that they’re willing to do what it takes. And I think the bandit sign idea’s a great one because it takes getting out of a comfort zone to get out there and put those signs out. Just thinking about it doesn’t seem like it but as soon as you know the rubber hits the road and you’ve got to actually go out and put them up and there’s people walking around looking at you and all that kind of stuff, it’s pretty uncomfortable.
Chance Housos: Yeah, I still remember my first time going out and putting up signs and I was nervous. I’m not going to lie. Like you said, it’s pretty uncomfortable the first time but after that it’s just business as usual once you get used to it. It’s kind of a pain to do it and that’s kind of why I tell everybody to do it because if they’re willing to go out and throw a hundred signs throughout out a month and spend $300 bucks on doing some signs then at least I know that they’re willing to take some type of action and then I can help them out throughout the rest of the way. I pretty much give my resources away if somebody is willing to take action, plus I may come up with a new wholesaler out of the deal.
Danny Johnson: Yeah, that’s awesome. So you are having them order and pay for and put out the signs and it’s not like you’re providing them the signs and all that kind of stuff. You’re just telling them what to do and they’ve got to follow directions, put some skin in the game and get out there because you’re basically showing them a way to find great real estate deals and what are great real estate deals worth to us as investors, right?
Chance Housos: Right.
Danny Johnson: It’s worth a lot of money and so you’re teaching them something, teaching them how to fish and the ones that can see the value in that are the ones to actually do it and then you work and nurture those relationships. Have you had any of those students turn out to start generating quite a few deals for you guys or has it been where you maybe just had one that produced maybe one or two deals?
Chance Housos: Yeah that’s been the case, just kind of a few producing here and there. A lot of people want to tell them to do something. I’ll say, “Okay, let me know as soon as you do it. I’ll even help you through them. I’ll tell you how to do it.” And a lot of people will say, “Yeah, yeah I’ll do it.” And then a month later they still haven’t done it, two months later they still haven’t done it. It’s like oaky they’re not actually serious enough to take action, so I know that it’s not worth my time to sit down and try to teach them anything else.
Danny Johnson: Oh yeah, for sure. So basically all of the wholesale deals that are coming across your desk basically from the Facebook groups and you have other sources of getting these sorts of deals from other wholesalers?
Chance Housos: Mailing list I’m on – I try to be on every single wholesaler’s mailing up here in Dallas and I’m constantly trying to add myself to new mailing lists and that’s how I found a few. There’s very few I would say that put out deals that can afford a rehabber like us and the reason I say can afford because somebody is obviously buying the deals they’re just not where I want them to be.
Danny Johnson: Right. So how do you go about finding all these buyers list to join? How do you how do you get on everybody’s buyers list?
Chance Housos: There are few ways. I use the if this, then that website—
Danny Johnson: IFTTT.
Chance Housos: And I put in quite a few keywords to notify me when somebody posts something on Craigslist and every time somebody posts something on Craigslist, a deal or anything, it sends me an email. I can jump on the Craigslist at any time from my email and then I can reach out to the wholesaler.
Danny Johnson: Nice, nice. So what kind of keywords are you targeting in that Craigslist search?
Chance Housos: Fixer-upper, rehab, needs work, ARV. What else – vacant house, motivated seller. That’s pretty much the gist of it.
Danny Johnson: Yeah, it’s pretty nice. That probably picks up most of them especially the terms like ARV and stuff. So for people listening that maybe aren’t aware of the if this, then that IFTTT.com. It’s basically where you can set up recipes, I think that’s what they call right? Recipes. And you can target a Craigslist query, so you go to Craigslist and you put in these keywords that you’re looking for in a search I think separated by the pipe symbol—
Chance Housos: Right. That’s what I was going to say. You put a space and then I guess it’s called the pipe and then another space and the next word. I think I have like 10 different words, everything you could think of that would have some kind of house in distress in it and then it sends me an email as soon as somebody post something out there.
Danny Johnson: Great. So you do that that search and then you copy what the query string is for the URL for the search results and then you can put that into the recipe and then hook on your email, so that service will run that query for you I think like once a day. Can you do more than once a day?
Chance Housos: Yeah, I don’t remember how often you can do it, but I think you can do it a few times a day.
Danny Johnson: Okay. And then you get some notifications when there’s new ones which is pretty nice and something I thought of when you were saying that was when you get new ones and you look at those and read those ads that people put up, there’s probably a lot more words that you can find in reading other people’s ads to see words that you might see, so you can pull in even more searches based on the query, right?
Chance Housos: Right. Absolutely.
Danny Johnson: Yeah. That’s an awesome way to do that and then so you get all of their email list and so when they have deals, they email those email lists and then you receive the email with the deal. So here’s a question I’ve got that I’ve talked about with my team often and I don’t know that we still even do it, but to get on all those buyers list and then get all those deals in your inbox and you look at them quickly like you were saying just like the ones in the Facebook group where you determine like “Oh well it’s not really going to fit my numbers” do you ever negotiate with them?
Chance Housos: Yeah. I’ve found that sometimes it’s best just to make an offer no matter what they’re asking and my reasoning and thought process is because if they only have three weeks to close, the first week they’re going to be asking for as much as they can get for it, but as it gets closer and closer to closing, if they haven’t written it up with somebody then they still want to monetize that deal and they may take $5,000 instead of $15,000 just to get to the deal closed. If you could close in seven days or five days, in a couple of days you can usually negotiate the deal lower based on time is money, so the faster you can close the more money you’re worth.
Danny Johnson: Yeah. I think there’s a lot of people not utilizing the fact that maybe it’s not a deal at the number they put out there, but it could be at a lower number and you never know when they might accept it. That’s the one thing I always been trying to get with the team is like I want to see all these deals and then just shoot back a quick much lower offer just to see if there’s any response and if there is a response you know that there’s a little bit of thinking there where they’re not getting any attention and they’re like well I need to work on this because it’s the only bite I got. You know what I mean?
Chance Housos: Right, absolutely. We’ve even done the same thing on some of the deals that we’ve actually wholesaled. I think that helps that we’ve we wholesale some deals as well. So we’re kind of in the same boat as they are. We understand exactly what they want because that’s what we want [inaudible]
Danny Johnson: Yeah, you understand their needs.
Chance Housos: Absolutely.
Danny Johnson: And that helps because you know what they’re going to be interested in hearing. Like you said the whole closing thing and having a done deal, so they can move on to work other deals. Do you do anything where you work any deals with other people because you do wholesaling yourself, like you just said, so do you have like a decent-sized buyers list and are able to move properties? Do you ever work deals with other people to sell their deals?
Chance Housos: Yeah. We’ve done that a few times. Our buyers list isn’t huge, so we don’t do it too often. We have had other people help us sell our deals though. It’s kind of went both ways. That’s something we’re actually working on now is building our buyers for us to be able to do that for other people as well as help ourselves.
Danny Johnson: Nice. Would you mind sharing some of the tactics you’re using to grow the buyers list?
Chance Housos: Yeah, absolutely. Every deal that we take down even if it’s something that we’re going to rehab ourselves, we’ll put it out there on Craigslist, on some of the facebook groups that just say, “Hey, ___ in this area. Send me your information if you’re interested in it.” And we’ll do that on Craigslist, on Facebook, and just post multiple times and people respond to that. That’s pretty much the main way we do it. We have looked into purchasing a list of cash buyers and sending them mail seeing if they want it to be added to the list.
Danny Johnson: Where do you get that list? From ListSource?
Chance Housos: Yeah. ListSource is probably the best place to get a list like that. Just going through maybe in the past year or two and seeing who has 100% equity in their property who’s paid it off and then absentee owners so you know that they’re investors and they’re not just homeowners and then sending that list your information saying, “Hey, I buy property in the area. I’m a wholesaler. Would you be interested in being on our on our buyers list?” And to see what responses you get. We haven’t done it yet, but we’ve had a few people do it to us off some other property that we had bought and I thought it was a great idea.
Danny Johnson: Oh, absolutely. Because a lot of people that you find are people that have used a realtor to find the deal and stuff like that or you know are that some of the prices that you can offer the deals up to. Since you haven’t done it yet but you’re about to, do you plan on putting like examples of numbers for deals just to get their mouths watering a little bit and wanting to talk with you?
Chance Housos: I hadn’t thought about that but that’s a great idea that I think I’m going to utilize. I’m going to steal that from you.
Danny Johnson: Yeah, I know. Because you’ve got to give them some something to base it on because when you say “we have deals” like what does that mean and we had sent those letters out to quite a bit and I found some of my best buyers doing it that way and just looking for cash holds on houses that needed a lot of work on the MLS and finding those people it took a little bit more work to get the addresses. It was much smaller list, but I could hit them several times but I found it and including the information especially if you’re doing that from the MLS where it’s a cash sold recently. And you know that they paid a lot of money because you saw the house and you’re like, “Man, they paid quite a bit for that.” And then you can personalize the letter and say, “I know that you bought this house and I could offer you of the same kind of house for much cheaper. If you’re interested give me a call” or have the call to action be to go to your website to join the buyer’s list or whatever and found that to be, even though it can be more time consuming, I think you can find some of the active recent buyers that way too.
Chance Housos: Yeah. You might actually find a few private lenders that way as well.
Danny Johnson: Oh yeah, it’s a good idea. Yeah, if you’re doing research find as much stuff as you can find if you’re spending the time to do it.
Chance Housos: Absolutely.
Danny Johnson: So do you guys have a team that helps you with all of this or are you guys building the team? Where are you at with all of that?
Chance Housos: We are building our team. It’s Josh and I and then we have an acquisitions manager that goes on the appointments, puts the houses under contract and handles all of our lead intake at the moment.
Danny Johnson: Oh nice. So has that changed things for you pretty dramatically?
Chance Housos: Oh, he’s only been on for this month. This is the first month he’s been on. We haven’t really got to see how much the dial’s going to get turned up, but it enabled us to turn the dial up on our marketing and our ability to go see some more of these wholesale properties and then for us to be able to network a lot more because I don’t have to worry about being glued to the fall and taking the lead intake, going on the appointments as much. So that’s just enabling us to do more of that to expand our business.
Danny Johnson: Yeah, it’s nice. It turns out too Grayson who’s on my team actually went to high school with you as well. He remembers you.
Chance Housos: Oh really.
Danny Johnson: Yeah, but I think he said that you were in a grade above him, but it’s pretty interesting we all went to the same high school. It’s kind of interesting.
Chance Housos: It’s a pretty small world.
Danny Johnson: Now you’re in Dallas and I’m in San Antonio. I guess the wholesaling aspect of it, do you see yourself kind of like focusing still more on that or are you finding that targeting sellers in different ways and getting them to just contact you directly is more of where your focus is for the future?
Chance Housos: I would say we’re leaning more towards sourcing our own deals now just because of our ability too. I’m not writing off any of the relationships that we already have or that we’re going to build, but I feel like in order to turn the dial up and to do more deals to flip more properties it’s better for us to work for our stuff I guess in finding deals.
Danny Johnson: Oh yeah for sure when you want to reach that certain level. I think it is a very good add on if you’ve got somebody to help with all the busy work like you said, like looking at each of those properties and building those relationships that you have somebody in your team that can do it but. And then for new people that maybe don’t have much of a budget to be able to go out and do the marketing direct for deals themselves to use this approach to be able to get these leads. And I think it’s a good way to find leads for deals and practice analyzing them and then going out and looking at some of those even with no intention of actually buying just to experience what it’s like to walk through a house that another investor has put under contract that needs a lot of work to find out what you don’t know.
Chance Housos: Right. Well that’s one thing you have to consider too when you’re buying from a wholesaler versus sourcing your own deal. You have to think about what that deal would cost you if you had to source it yourself. I know I’ve heard you talk about what it cost you to find the deal in your market and it’s somewhere around the $3,000 dollar mark, you need $3,000 dollars to find a pretty decent rehab opportunity, so I can take that off of the profit that I would expect to make from something I source myself that I’m buying from a wholesaler, but essentially I’m giving them that much money to bring them into the deal.
Danny Johnson: You know it’s funny I’ve never thought about it that way, but you’re absolutely right. Yeah, I like that. I like the way you’re thinking about that because there’s certain lead sources that we’re using sometimes some of the direct mail campaigns end up being $5,000 per deal up close to $6,000 on some of them.
Chance Housos: Right.
Danny Johnson: And so, man if you could offer them much more on the deal that you’re getting through them – obviously you don’t want to be saying, “Well, I could have spent $10,000 to get this so I’m going to pay them $10,000 more.” You still got to make sure you got plenty of room in the deal, but maybe the average of all the marketing that you’re doing or what other serious investors in your market are doing and then doing that. But obviously you’re giving up some profit and some room in it when you do that. But I do like considering the fact that on your own it’s like you’re not making all that profit because you didn’t have marketing costs involved to get that deal.
Chance Housos: Absolutely. Especially if you have an acquisitions person and then your marketing cost, you’re talking about a pretty substantial amount of money that it costs you to source every deal.
Danny Johnson: Oh, yeah absolutely. It adds up quick. What I was thinking to the other day I was looking at numbers for the marketing costs for the leads in deals and you know so I’d see ones where it was like direct mail costs $5,000 to $6,000 a deal and that’s kind of shocking, but we still make quite a bit of money in each deal when you flip and make $30+ on a rehab definitely still worth it. But what I did see also was like the marketing channels where we spent money, but didn’t even get a deal and it’s like that one doesn’t show a number for cost per deal because we didn’t have a deal and so you kind of ignore it and I was like, “Wait, we can’t ignore that though because we spent all that money and didn’t get anything.” And so maybe the one that’s $5,000 per deal is even much better than those because they were just a black hole we put money into.
Chance Housos: Right.
Danny Johnson: I don’t know how that fits this conversation, but it was just like one of those things where it’s like “ouch.”
Chance Housos: Yeah, I know. I’ve done the exact same thing so I definitely understand where you’re coming from.
Danny Johnson: So what are your plans to grow? What are you guys what are you going to be shooting for? Are you just going to finish out the year strong with roughly tow per month?
Chance Housos: We’re trying to get it up to four a month. So we’ve really been dropping a lot of money into marketing and pay-per-click and stuff of that sort. We use LeadPropeller. We use you guys for our website and our SEO stuff and also for our Google AdWords management. So that’s been showing to be decent for us doing pretty good and we’ve still doing quite a bit of direct mail. So that’s we’re headed is doing about four a month by the end of the year.
Danny Johnson: Yeah and that’s a lot. You add that up and in 12 months you’ve got roughly 50 deals for a year which is pretty crazy. Are you guys focused on mainly rehabbing wholesaling or are you making any adjustments there in the percentage that you rehab versus wholesale or—
Chance Housos: We are doing mostly rehabs. I think as the needle turns and if it gets to 5, 6, 7, 8 deals a month we’ll probably do a lot more wholesaling and continue to probably do three or four rehabs a month and then just kind of let the wholesale deals feed the machine if that makes sense.
Danny Johnson: Yeah. That’s cool. I think it’s a good strategy. The market up there is still staying strong.
Chance Housos: Yeah. It’s really strong. I think that it’s starting to slow down a little bit. I’m not sure how it is down Antonio, but we’re starting to I guess feel a little bit of a level off. Things aren’t flying off the shelves as fast as they were before, but it’s still a hot market.
Danny Johnson: Oh, yeah. You have a lot of Texas ___ we’re blessed to be in this state. Well, I really appreciate you taking time to be on the show Chance and for anybody out there that’s listening and wants to get a hold of you maybe for questions or maybe they are a wholesaler wanting to start work with you because they’re there in the Dallas area, how can people reach out to you and get a hold of you?
Chance Housos: They can reach out by going by email they can go to [email protected] and they can also find me on Facebook, my name is Chance Housos, H-O-U-S-O-S and that’s my real last name.
Danny Johnson: Yeah. Yeah, it’s O-S not HOUSES, but O-S.
Chance Housos: Yes, O-S.
Danny Johnson: Yeah. They had that misspelled at the meeting.
Chance Housos: Yeah, they did. I had to correct it.
Danny Johnson: It’s like, did you change your name to that when you started flipping houses – but no. So I appreciate it and like I said I want to I want to go up there and see you sometime soon. We’re not that far. And if you find yourself coming down San Antonio definitely reach out to me hang out a little bit, but thanks for being on the show.
Chance Housos: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.
Alright another fantastic episode. Thank you so much Chance for being on the show and want to do a couple quick shout outs for people left ratings and review for the Flipping Junkie Podcast on iTunes and you know what I’m doing is if you would go to flippingjunkie.com/rate you can find out how to do that and I’ll give you a shout out for leaving the rating review for the podcast. So if you’re enjoying it or you’ve got some even some advice for me or whatever just post it on the rate and reviews on iTunes.
So we’ve got one here from Jenreday, “If you want to know the world of flipping houses intimately, this is the only podcast you need, so many details I’ve never would have thought of. Loved it. Each episode is a gem. Thanks Danny.” Thank you so much Jen for that and everybody else. If you are enjoying it go to iTunes and please rate and review it and if you’ve got a friend or anybody else interested in getting into flipping houses be sure to share the podcast with them and let them know to subscribe to get new episodes and the best place to start is to go back in that series of podcasts episodes did from mindset and foundation to finding money for deals and how to analyze deals all the way through. It’s sort of like an audio course training for flipping houses definitely share that with your friends and hope you guys have a great week and we’ll see you next time.
