The Wisconsin Investor

Mistakes to Mastery: Real Estate Lessons That Changed Everything

• Corey Reyment

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What if your worst flip could become your best teacher? In this episode, Corey pulls back the curtain on his real estate journey, from corporate sales burnout to building a Wisconsin-based real estate business powered by BRRRR, direct-to-seller, and rent-to-own strategies. No fluff—just the hard lessons, pivots, and small wins that added up to real momentum. 💡

We cover it all: hiring on gut feel, skipping background checks, and learning the hard way why contractors and processes matter. Plus, discover how to leverage mentorship, hit your first wholesale win, and navigate creative problem-solving strategies that turn losing flips into winning deals.

Here’s what you’ll take away:
 💼 Moving from sales to real estate freedom
 💰 Paying for mentorship to force commitment
 🔑 First wholesale win by connecting the right buyer
 🛠️ Ethics of wholesaling and clear exits
 🏡 Rent-to-own as a lifeline for thin or losing flips
 ⚠️ FHA and VA pitfalls like chipped paint and safety flags
 💪 Knowing strengths and outsourcing fieldwork
 📝 Building a hiring process and culture fit
 📈 Scaling teams, masterminds, and mindset shifts

Want to scale your real estate journey? 🎯 We’re offering free coaching calls and our BURR For Beginners course—at no cost! Head over to WisconsinDiscountProperties.com and mention you heard it on the podcast, and type “podcast” to claim your offer. Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share this with a friend who could use a little nudge forward! 🚀

SPEAKER_00:

What is going on, everybody? Corey Raymond, your host of the Wisconsin Investor Podcast. And I'm here today, guys, doing a solo episode. I'm so excited for this one. And uh I'm I'm looking forward to dropping some some of my experience and knowledge on you guys today. Um, but before I get into that, I always talk about a sponsorship. I'm gonna give you guys a little giveaway here at the end of the podcast. So hang on, listen to the end of this, till the end of this thing, and I'll give you a little a little free giveaway here. Um if you've listened to somebody that podcasts, I've done it on the front of it, but now I'm gonna make you hang on to the end here to get this. This is uh something that we used to sell for$2,000, and you guys are gonna get it for free today by listening to this episode. So excited to be here with you guys today. Um, I was at just at a Pace Morby event who was in town. He was in Green Bay, he's doing a little tour around. I've known Pace now for five, six years, something like that. And uh so it was great to see him hang out a little bit. And uh he had a great event, huge, huge show-up. Um at that event, uh, had a lot of you guys I was talking to there that um, you know, listen to the podcast. So I appreciate you guys listening. And I said, hey, what do you want to hear on the podcast? Like what would be a great topic? And uh some of you guys brought up, hey man, I'd love to hear your story more. I know I'm you know some people know it, or they've listened to maybe the first episode. I think I shared it a little bit, but they wanted to hear maybe more of the uh lessons learned, some stories that we've had over the years, and and lessons learned from some of the some of the mistakes we've made, uh, and how did we get to where we are today, and all that sort of stuff. And then I was actually just talking to Ashley from our team, and we were doing a little coaching call, and um, and she brought this up too. She said, Hey, it'd be cool to hear your story and how you got to where you are and all that sort of stuff. So that's what we're gonna talk about today, guys. We're gonna talk about the early days, we're gonna talk about some mistakes that we made uh in in different areas of real estate, and we're gonna hopefully be able to shed some light and give you guys a little bit more um things to not do, maybe, or to do based on some of these stories. So to give you guys just start out um what was life like before real estate? You know, we'll start there for all the listeners out there. You know, for for me, I was always in sales, and so I knew I always wanted to be in sales, and um I didn't really know like what I want to do with my life. I knew I didn't want to work for somebody forever. And you know, if you look at my personality profile, uh, it doesn't matter what personality test you take. Very difficult to rein me in, so to speak. You know, classic maverick that's called if you if you know what a PI test is from the personality index test uh predictive index test, it's called. Um, basically meaning I don't like a lot of rules, I don't like people telling me what to do. I like to just go out and make my own way, so to speak. And so I'd always worked for other people, I was always successful as a top sales rep at a couple different companies out of a hundred plus uh reps at each of those companies for years. And um, but I was always miserable, like hated it. And then not that I hated the companies or the people I worked with, I just felt like I was trapped, right? And like I couldn't get out. And again, some people's personality profiles, great. They they love their job, they love what they do, they have no intention of you know never needing to leave that. And that's great. That just wasn't me. I was didn't matter where I landed, I'd always get to a point where I was just burned out, didn't want to work there anymore, kind of wasn't stimulating anymore. I needed some other challenge to go take to go after. And um, so Carrie, my wife and I, we got together in 2008. Great year for real estate investors out there, right? Um, and and we weren't in into real estate at that time. I'd always been interested in it, but we we weren't there yet. And um, I had a personal training studio that I had started just kind of on the side. I was doing that nights, weekends, and mornings. And um uh was so I kind of learned some lessons that way. What number one, I learned I need to work on my hiring skills. So this is this is pre um real estate, but it's similar to some of you guys out there that are are running your own shops right now and you're in doing a lot of the work and you're doing the labor and all that kind of stuff. At some point, depending on your goals, you may need to hire some people to get yourself out of that, right? And this is still a skill that I I need to put some more time and effort into. Our team right now is amazing, but I've definitely made some mistakes hiring years over years, over years, and learned some lessons in the process. But early on, uh I was running this personal training studio and uh I I had uh we had our daughter Kaylee, who's now 13, and uh I was like, I can't keep running this training stuff mornings and by the way. At this point of this story, I'd gotten fired from my sales job because I was a maverick and I was uh I was ruffling a lot of feathers in the in the office. Now, as a business owner, I understand why I got fired. I was bitter for many years, and then uh now I understand it. I was not a good cultural fit, probably. So that being said, uh had this personal training studio still running. This was gonna be my main income now. And I'm like, well, if I'm gonna grow this thing, I gotta hire some people and get out of the day-to-day stuff, right? And I was pretty cheap at the time. I just was like, hey, somebody come and get me out of having to do having to physically be here and do these things, you know, four or five days a week, mornings and nights. Like, I need to breathe there. I want to spend time, you know, with my wife when she's home from work and all that sort of stuff. So I brought a guy in, did zero background check on him, absolutely zero. Um, but he was fit and he said he was a former manager and personal trainer at an Anytime Fitness in town. It's like perfect, you're hired, dude. Actually, before I said that, I said, hey, will you work off of commission? Because I didn't have a big nest egg to pay this guy. I didn't know how to pay you know taxes on you know income, uh, you know, or payroll taxes. I didn't know any of that stuff. So I said, man, if I just pay this guy like kind of like a 1099 contractor and just pay him, you know, commission, cool. Like, let's let's do that. And he agreed. He was like, yeah, that's fine. I'll work for commission. Done. You're hired, you know. Um, so brought him in. And uh he was there for a while and he he was doing okay. And uh at the same time, he would get sick every so often, so I'd have to go in, or he just wouldn't show up once in a while. So I'd have to get called up by the clients, and they're like, hey, it's six in the morning. We're out here, and and uh this guy's not here. And I'm like, geez, so I'd have to like rush out of the house, run over there, give him as much as I could of a training, credit him back, you know, that kind of thing. And then uh I brought another guy in to help out with giving him a little break and didn't do any check on this guy. He was in his 40s, rode his bike to the gym because he didn't have a car, was living with his parents, and I was like, Yeah, dude, you're hired. Of course. Why not? A couple red flags there I've learned over the over the years, you know. So uh both these guys, one guy, the the first guy, he was stealing money from me. He was having the clients pay him in cash and then just keeping the cash full full of months. I'd call him up, I'd be like, hey, you know, you're you you didn't make your monthly payment here for your sessions. They're like, Yeah, we we paid him. I'm like, how'd you pay him cash? Oh, geez. The other guy was um was mostly females. It was mostly females in my gym, and he was messaging a lot of the ladies afterwards, you know, messages about getting together, you know, things like that, things you don't do as a trainer. So I learned a few valuable lessons there. A, do some background checks on these people, call some references, and still not perfect at that. We have a little more of a process now that we run through in our company. But that was uh my first entrance into trying to grow and scale a business. So for those of you out there listening, you know, if you are gonna scale, you do have to hire people. You know, you're gonna have to get you're gonna have to get people in in different seats in the in your company and get yourself out of doing the day-to-day work and train some other folks. But that was before I was even into real estate. So that was a early lesson. Uh, I I took some of those lessons into the real estate space and have had to learn again the hard way a few different times to uh have a better hiring process that we came up with now that's been working really well. But um, it it definitely is something you want, you don't want to just be desperate to hire, is what I've learned in that process. Um, but real estate came in, really, we were doing some network marketing for several years as well. So being in that in the personal training space, there's a lot of health products out there in the network marketing space. And so we were selling some health products, we were making a nice little residual income. And we did that for about five years. We just didn't really love the business of it as much anymore. You know, like it was it was draining to have to be, you know, chasing down friends and family and trying to get them to sign up for the products. And even though we believed in the products and we thought they were great for people, we just didn't love the process of having to do that. But we liked the residual income. So uh like most people in this space, we read Rich Dad Poor Dad. And so if you haven't read that book yet, you know, maybe we'll get we'll grab a link and throw that in the uh in the show notes here and um you know, go get that book either on Audible or or written. And as soon as we read that, we're like, oh my gosh, this is our way to residual income to get us out of this job, this job thing that I was just dreading having to do for the rest of my life. Just felt so hopeless. Like, how am I ever going to get to a point where I can, you know, replace my income and and do something different? And then we found real estate. And um, it was super exciting. I remember Carrie when she when she kind of caught the bug too, it was so awesome because we were just both linked and we're like, we're doing this together. You know, she had a set of skills I didn't have. And um she, you know, she she definitely was a huge piece of us growing this business together. But uh we started reading everything we could read. Uh we're bigger pockets was still like the main thing back then, and it still is a big thing nowadays with their podcasts and all the education they put out. But we started diving into all that sort of stuff. We started going to RIA groups and trying to network and do everything we could, but we still felt like overwhelmed. I remember feeling like, oh my gosh, like this is still like how are we ever going to get there? It just seemed like such a tough thing once we started like looking at properties. I remember we were going around with our real estate agent who helped us get our personal residence, and he was not uh I would say an investor-friendly agent. Great at helping us find nice a nice house to live in. Did a great job at that, great at negotiating those kinds of things. Um, but you could tell when we would when he would set up these showings for these duplexes that we we were looking at. We were looking for value add duplexes. Like he was just not, he was not feeling it. And uh he had made a few comments over time about really not loving the rental business game. Uh, and so we we just kind of knew like maybe this isn't the right thing. But I remember at the time going through all these properties that were on the market, this was 2016, and feeling like, how are people making this work? Right. Like I remember looking at the numbers and you know, we didn't have a ton of extra cash playing around. I think I had like$8,000 in the bank account at that point. And so we were like, well, how do people buy hundreds of units? Or even like one of one of our good friends at the time, and still good friend to this day, meant early mentors, Tony Breuer, a lot of you guys know out there from Good Faith Funding, he had like 50 rental doors at the time. And I'm like, dude, how did you do this? Like, you got to put 20% down, sometimes 25% down, sometimes 30% down. Then you gotta you gotta rehab these things and you gotta stick all this money into it. Where do you get all this cash to like buy 50 doors, right? And that's when we we started to get a little more hope once we started asking some of those questions and we learned about the BURR process, right? And so there's a whole nother episode um where I do a solo episode on the BURR process. So I'm not gonna break that down on this episode if that's foreign language to you, that acronym. Um, it stands for buy rehab rent refinance. And it's a way for you to recycle capital so that you don't have to have that 20, 25% down plus all the rehabs stuck into the property forever, maybe for a short period of time, but then you refinance it, you get all that money back out. Right? That's the play. And then you go do that again and again and again and again and again. All right. But the problem was a lot of these properties when we were looking that were on market, even then, once we understood the Burr process, we we were like, how are people making these numbers work? Right. Um, we actually did have an accepted offer on one that was on market before we started going direct to seller, and uh it ended up falling apart. So the the looking back now, I'm like, dang, I wish I would have bought that thing because it was in today's market, it would have been such a smoking deal. But at the time it seemed like it was still kind of a questionable deal. And we got an inspection on it, and we went back to the seller and she agreed to a lower price, which was great. But then we got a call from the title company basically saying, hey, we ran the title report or the title search, and the offer you guys have is less than um what she owes, and she doesn't have any extra capital to bring to the table. And it was a pretty significant difference, and so we just took that as a sign at the time that, gosh, maybe this this isn't the right, the right deal for us. Maybe we should just pause and and redirect things. So that was one of the early struggles I remember was just feeling like we were never gonna get a deal. I mean, I think this was like it went on. We looked at properties for three, four months, made offers, finally had one, and then it fell apart. And then it was it was kind of deflating to get to that point, and then it fell apart. So we started again asking more questions at these Rhea groups, and we found a uh early mentor, a local guy who was doing some wholesaling. And we said, Well, we don't know anything about that, but it's direct to sellers, so that's how you get the best deals, he said. Like, okay, great. So coach us, teach us. So we gave him 10 grand to coach us up, and then we had to split the first three deals, I think it was, with them. And so we learned some of the basics. You know, it was really good to uh uh I would uh one of the lessons I learned from that is you know, paying for mentorship, even if the mentorship is not uh maybe what your expectation was for it, you know, that was kind of our situation. We don't feel like we didn't feel like maybe the expectation going into it is quite what we received, but just to have to put that kind of capital down and we didn't have a lot of money really made us motivated to make it work. We're like, okay, there's no going back. It was kind of like burning the ships, right? Like we have to go back. We can't go back to to not make this work. It has to work now because we have to at least get our 10 grand back, or we're gonna be in a big pickle here financially. Um, and so we got a few deals going that way, you know, just from reaching directly out to sellers. I don't recommend direct to seller for everybody. You know, that's a it was a lot more work than I thought it was. But when we started, we were really doing it to build our own portfolio. Um, you know, we came up with this goal, we looked at our finances, then we looked at our expenses, and we looked at what did we want our life to look like, right? Well, we wanted to travel. We wanted to um be able to have the option to homeschool our kids at some point so we could travel with them and show them the world through experiences that was important to us. And so we were starting to reverse engineer our life when we started getting into real estate. And so part of the way that we thought we would get there is get get to 100 units as quickly as possible, get those things to cash flow of 200 bucks a month, and boom, we are at our goal. We are financially free. Like beyond, you know, we were again, we had$8,000 in the bank when we started. So that to us was seemed like, yes, that's a huge, crazy goal at the time. But let's set, let's, let's set that intention and go after it. And then we put our money behind it and said, all right, here's$10,000, teach us how to do this so that we can we can hit this goal as soon as possible. So we started doing that stuff, and we weren't intending to wholesale anything at the time. It was just buy and hold. And through networking, we ran across a good friend of ours still to this day, Joe Ullman. And I remember she had said something at one of the meetups when I was talking to her that she liked unique properties, like weird ones. And so we were sending out letters at the time. We were uh handwriting on envelopes, which we figured out better systems later on. But again, we were motivated, like we'll put the work in. We didn't have the capital, so we had to put the sweat equity in. And we carry my wife would handwrite on the envelopes to landlords. And so there's lists you can get called absentee owner lists, and that basically means it's an address or a it's a property where the owner does not live in the property. So their address, their mailing address is different than the property address. And so we were mailing these people. I want to say maybe there was like 600 names or something that we had on this list. And we were mailing them, and one of the first ones we got, it was a one-bedroom, one bath in the Howard Swamaco area near Green Bay. It's a great area, great schools, all that kind of stuff. But for our goal, a one-bedroom, one bath, I didn't really have any need for that. I didn't really want a one-bedroom, one bath, right? So, but I went and looked at it. I said, Oh, come take a peek at the house, right? Get some experience walking through houses, talking to sellers, negotiating, all that kind of stuff. So I used it as a learning lesson. But as I was walking through there, I noticed the backyard sloped down a little bit. And I thought, well, this would be really a great location if somebody could, you know, dig this out somehow and put in two bedrooms down here. Now you have a three-bedroom in this neighborhood. This would be great. And so Joe came to my head right away, just from doing the networking and I said, Well, I'll give her a call and see if if she would have any interest in this. And she brought her contractor through, and I kind of painted the vision for her of what I thought it could be. And she saw that vision and she she took it and put her own creative spin on it. And I remember Carrie and I were driving across uh uh one of the bridges here in Green Bay, and Joe called and said, Hey, yeah, we had my contractor look at it. I think the numbers work. You know, what do you want to get for it? And I think I said like 55,000. We had it under contract for 50. And she said, Okay, yeah, we can do that. And I remember like, oh my gosh, this is incredible. And Carrie and I are like, high fiving, trying to stay cool and calm on the phone with Joe and stuff. And so we scheduled the time to sign the paperwork and get the cash from her. And I think she did it in like two different installments, once up front, and then once when everything closed. And um, yeah, we made$5,000 just from connecting some people and helping create some win-wins, you know, which was which was super rewarding. And I said, I really like that. I want to do more of that type of thing of helping people who want to do projects and make some money and help out people uh who are in in situations where they they don't really want to sell on the market. And so we started leaning more into that that thing. Um, our next deal we did was another wholesale deal. It was this upper lower duplex. I don't remember why we didn't want to buy. Maybe we didn't have the capital because we had just bought um we just bought one to buy and hold. So I think we were maybe holding off on adding another buy and hold when and we we got a little taste of that that wholesale deal. And then it happened pretty quick. We wholesaled that one, and at the same time, about a couple weeks difference um from putting them under contract, we got a uh upper lower duplex in Green Bay that worked for us under contract. So then uh the third one, I guess this would be, was a um uh another wholesale deal that we were planning to do. Now, a lesson learned here if you guys are out there wholesaling and you're listening to this or you're thinking of wholesaling, uh, one lesson I learned is make sure you're upfront honest with these sellers about what you're gonna do. You know, now at the time I didn't really know what we were gonna do, so I'll give myself a little grace here that I didn't I I really truly probably didn't know what to do with this property, if I was gonna buy and hold it or if I was gonna try to sell it to somebody else. Um, but the seller was a tough cookie. It was a uh lady in her probably 60s, and she was a boss, man. Like, I would not mess with her. She would whip me up. And uh she we went there, looked at the property. She had some tenants in there that she was arguing with out the window. They wouldn't answer her phone calls, they wouldn't pay rent, you know, they were just yelling at each other through the windows and going back and forth, and I was like, holy cow. In my head, I'm like, this is great because she's gonna be super motivated now to get rid of this property. Um, she takes us down in the basement and she's showing us the water meters, and she had split the water, which is awesome, because then you can, you know, you can have each unit pay their own water. Typically, landlords and a lot of these duplexes just end up paying the water. Um, but she had the option to be able to pay both. Well, she was showing us how she turned their water off, which is illegal, by the way. You can't turn water off on your tenants. And what she said was they won't answer my phone call, they won't pay rent. So what I do is I turn their water off, and then I call the water company and I tell them that, hey, if you get a call from the tenant, we're just doing some maintenance. It'll just be down for a little bit. We'll we'll have their water back up here shortly. And that way they answer my phone calls, and lo and behold, they'll pay rent. And I just I just started laughing. But that's that's the type of lady that I was dealing with on this one. Uh anyway, we ended up wholesaling that deal. We found a buyer for it. And she found out that we had a different buyer. It wasn't us closing, and that that really upset her uh for whatever reason. I don't know if it's just because I I I wasn't upfront and transparent about it or what the case was, but she ended up taking the garbage bin the garbage bin. She dumped the trash out and the recycling out in the property on closing day and took the garbage cans. And I remember calling her and I said, Hey, her name was we'll call her Mary. I said, Hey Mary, uh I just got to the property to check on it and make sure the keys all worked and all that stuff. And um, I noticed there's a bunch of trash in the backyard and the garbage cans are gone. Any idea like how that would have happened? And she said, Yeah, I took the garbage cans. And I was like, what? And uh she said, Yeah, they um they weren't written into the offer. So I took them. And I was like, okay. So another lesson I learned in that case is if you if you want something that's not fixed to the property, make sure you write it in the offer. Now I've never had that happen since we've done probably a thousand deals uh since that time frame, and nobody else has ever taken the city garbage cans from the property. But uh I I now make sure I or our team write in anything that a seller is gonna leave behind, right? That's a that's a value. So we don't just take their word for it, we write it in the contract, right? We don't do the garbage cans anymore. We used to literally for like two or three years since Mary, we wrote in garbage cans included in the offers, but we we don't do that anymore. Nobody else has has pressed pressed on that and taken the garbage cans. But uh that was an interesting uh situation. So always write in if you want something in the contracts. Uh in that same time frame, another lesson learned here is uh I really fell in love with rent to owns as a as a saving grace, uh as an option. So if you guys aren't familiar with rent to own, I'll explain it to you real briefly. Essentially, what this is for is uh this is typically the person who's gonna be a tenant buyer, as we call it, somebody who can't qualify for a traditional mortgage for various reasons, right? Now you can also do land contracts with these people. There's pros and cons to that. I had Sean St. Clair on a while back in some episodes, and I'm pretty sure we broke this down. He's an attorney, awesome attorney here in Wisconsin. Um he's actually one of Pace Morbies attorneys too. But we broke down rent to owns and land contracts and pros and cons to that. I tend to go rent to own in in a lot of cases, um, just for ease. That's a little simpler, especially if you have underlying loans and those kinds of things. But the uh we had bought a property at the same time with that first real estate agent I told you that we were going to live in for our primary residence. We were out in Pulaski, which is where I grew up, and we hated it. We were in Green Bay every day. Our kids were in a um preschool across town. We were spending more time driving to Green Bay back and forth than we were even enjoying our property. And um we just were like, gosh, we should really sell this and just move back to Green Bay. Um problem was we paid about$320,000 for this house. We uh put about$11,000 into some electrical work into a big garage that it had. And again, this is all at the time where we really didn't have a lot of extra cash. So we were like six months in. The market did not appreciate enough to get us back those what would be six percent realtor fees if we sold it plus the eleven thousand dollars. Like we were gonna take a bath on this house if we sold it. For whatever reason, I don't remember why we decided to go ahead and list it. But before we listed it, the agent, I talked to him and I said, Hey, I'm getting into real estate. I'm gonna also try to find myself a buyer for this because I need to save the money on this, man. Like I need to try to, I need to try to save these commissions. So I'm gonna be kind of competing against you to find myself a buyer. Uh if I find myself a buyer, I'm not, I'm not paying any commission on it. Do we have a deal? And he agreed. Said, that's fine. If you find yourself a buyer, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll cancel the contract, the listing contract. It's perfect. So I started, I put it out for rent to own. And again, I didn't really know what rent to own was, but we had had a we had hired those those mentors. And so they kind of helped coach us through rent to own and got us some of the paperwork at the time. Now there's actually a standard Wisconsin rent-to-own form that you can get. So the state put together, it's called an option agreement. And it's a standard um document that you can get right on the state's website. Uh, the at this time you had to make up your own option agreement. So we ended up finding just from putting, I think I put it on Facebook Marketplace. And that's still where we put it on. If we have rent to owns that we were trying to do, we still use Facebook Marketplace, and it is a great resource for us as it could as it relates to rent to owns. And we ended up selling it for, I believe,$355 or something like that. Um, and we again we paid$320 plus the$11,000. So we marked it up a little bit. Benefit was now we didn't have to pay those 6% realtor fees. So instead of losing a bunch of money on the sale of that, we actually were now gonna be profiting on that on that property. Uh, plus they were gonna be paying monthly rent, and we were cash flowing a couple hundred bucks on that monthly rent every month. So it was really a great situation for us. We put a couple escalation clauses in there as well. So if they couldn't buy it within, I think three years, it went up like 15% because we basically said, hey, every year, you know, properties typically appreciate about five percent. So after if you can't buy it within these three years, and then you want to buy it after that, it's gonna be an additional 15%. They ended up going up, I believe, five years as a rent-to-own on that. But that was an early win for us. We got pretty lucky in that case. Um, but it really taught me like, hey, if I get a flip now, we have one right now as I'm recording this, that we had a we for whatever reason we did not do a well and septic inspection on this thing. Here's what I'm gonna tell you guys if you're on our buyer's list going forward, if this property's older, we are getting well in septic inspections from now on. Okay, so you can rest assured that's gonna be in that buyer resource folder for you because we didn't do it on this one. We ended up going through and and flipping it. And we had a buyer, they got a well and septic inspection, and the well needs to be redone and the septic needs to be redone. So we went from like making maybe 15 or 20,000. So we're probably gonna lose like 15 grand on this thing if we sell it the traditional way. Okay. So taking that early lesson from my personal residence back in 2017, we are now eight years later doing something similar where we're gonna put it out as a rent to own. We'll fix this well on the septic and all that sort of stuff. And even if I do rent to own on this thing, I don't think I'm gonna be able to get much more than still maybe making$15,000 if I do that route. But now again, I can mark that price up because you know you're providing a premium service for somebody. Uh, I don't have to pay realtor fees if I do this. So I'm saving that, you know, we we pay about 4% because we're investors, we do a lot of volume, we get a discount on the listing commissions and all that sort of stuff. So we're our net realtor commission is normally 4%. Um and so we can go that route without having to pay those realtor fees, and we can market up. So we can make a little bit of a spread here now and try to help somebody who can't qualify for a mortgage right now. Now, what they do when they rent the owns is they put money down. Like I don't just put people in there and say, great, here's your future purchase price, just pay me regular rent. Like they have to put down money as an option fee. And so you're able to get at least some of your cash back and give yourself a little cushion. So if they don't perform, they don't end up buying it, you have to evict them for whatever reason, their life circumstance changes, they decide they don't want to buy the property, whatever the case is. Now you at least got a chunk of cash that you get to keep. Okay. So it's not like a security deposit. Like a security deposit, we all know that doesn't even cover anything hard. Anyway, if somebody destroys your place. In this case, it's it's pretty significant. So we've gotten up to$100,000 down on one of these rent-to-owns on a$270,000 purchase. So people have cash a lot of times, but they can't get a loan for some reason. And so those people are perfect for these rent-to-own situations. So that's what we're doing right now. But that was a lesson learned from 2017. Hey, I got a deal here. I'm going to lose money on it if I sell it the traditional way. I'm going to try to do a rent-to-own on this thing and try to make this turd into a win, is what we learned in that story. So that was a lot of the early days. The other thing we learned too is I am not handy at all. And a lot of you guys out there listening might be handy, but it might be costing you a lot more than what you're gaining from that. And so here's a couple examples of that. Another flip that year, we decided uh to start flipping a lot of properties too. So we were doing, we started out wanting rentals, then we realized, hey, if we just flip and wholesale more properties, I can get out of my job a lot quicker than going the longer term route of the rentals. And then once I'm out of the job, then we can start acquiring properties again. And so we started shifting to that model. And a couple instances where I try to get in and do a little bit of work. I learned a few things too. I didn't realize buyers have different lending uh programs. So there's things like FHA loans, there's VA loans. They have specific requirements that they will not lend on a property if some of the conditions are not met. So for example, if there's peeling paint or chip paint, they will flag that and that has to be fixed prior to closing. So we had a proper in Algoma, and we were living in Green Bay, so about 45 minutes away, not the end of the world. We had hired a contractor for it. Um I could do a whole episode on contractors. That's a whole nother animal. I won't get into all of that today. But the point is, we had a buyer. It's in the year, towards winter-ish months, fall, November, December. We were going to close on this property. Well, we had some shutters there that had peeling paint and all that sort of stuff. And the contract we had at this point, it kind of flaked out on the job. He was kind of like gone. Couldn't really get him to come back and do anything. So the day of the appraisal for this FHA loan, I had to go out to this property and try to spray paint the shutters while they were still in the house to try to keep it from getting flagged by this appraiser. Meanwhile, it is probably 30 degrees and windy. Like so wind chill is probably like 10 degrees. And I'm out there trying to spray paint this stuff, right? And I'm up on the ladders, I'm spray painting them, doing this stuff. And I'm miserable. I'm not, again, I'm I'm a paper pusher. I don't like getting out and getting dirty with this stuff. So I'm frustrated. I'm mad because I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not doing a great job, but it's getting done. I'm getting done when I need to get done. And I get back in the car and I remember I looked in the rearview mirror and I just had spray paint speckles like all over my face. And I just started laughing. I took a little picture and threw it on social media. I remember, and lesson learned, don't put me in there. I did another spray painting of shutters on a property about the same time of year. And our contractor on this property was much more reliable. Um, and brought these, you know, we took them home, took them off the property, uh, took them off the house, brought them home, spray painted them, brought it back to the property, and again it was like 15 degrees outside, and I'm drilling it back into the house, and it went too fast and cracked the vinyl on the shutter. Like first screw. And I just brought them into the house and gave them to my contractor. And I said, Andy, can you fix my mistakes? And he says, Yes, go home. Get out of here. You're messing everything up. Just go home and do it. So a lot of lessons learned there. And that's when I started realizing it's really, really important for me to know my strengths, know what I'm good at, and hire people for everything else that I don't love doing and that I'm not good at. And it's it took a while, right? We're now in 2022 2025, almost 2026 here by the time this episode is going to drop. And we started in 2016, so almost 10 years. Now we started hiring people pretty early on, but it took a while, right? And there were some other lessons learned there, as we talked about through hiring and scaling and growing and all that sort of stuff. But that was really a lot of the early stuff. You know, we were in doing trying to do some of the work and trying to skimp and save and um and and do all that sort of thing. And we've we learned some some some mistakes. Again, the wells, well, and septic thing, big mistake. They're missing out on some of those big ticket items that we went to have gotten. And um a lot of those have carried through. And so it's been quite the journey. We now have uh I believe about 15 employees in our wholesale company and and a few employees in some different real estate businesses we have for our holding companies and our short-term rentals and that sort of stuff. Um and so that's always we're always learning lessons through growing and scaling the company now, a real company, but that was the that was the early, the early days. And so uh I encourage all of you guys if you're out there listening to this episode and you're like, wow, I I feel overwhelmed. I feel like I can't, I'm never gonna be able to get 100 doors, or I'm never gonna be able to get out of my job, or I'm never gonna be able to have an extra 40,000 a year from from flips or whatever the case is. I'm never gonna be able to get these credit cards paid off. Just encourage you to stick with it. You know, get education. That was some of the big stuff that we learned. Get education. You know, the best asset you can you can invest in is yourself. It's your mindset, it's your education. It's all those things. And get around people that are doing, you know, that are further ahead than you and learn the lessons from them. So many lessons learned. You know, a lot of things I I probably would have made a hundred more mistakes I could have talked about on this episode had I have not gotten around people and learned from their mistakes. Or listen to podcasts like this and continue to learn from what not to do and what were the things that you need to do to be successful. Learn all that from other people. That's where I got all this stuff from. I just I'm just I just a big copycat most of the time. I just copy what other people did that works really well, and I implement it. All right. Um so do that and then get some coaching. I tell you what, one of the other big values here, guys, the thing I'm gonna give away to you today is we are doing free coaching calls. Okay. Now, I was talking to Reese from our team about this today, and he's so humble, but I mean, he does such a great job coaching people. I'm happy to coach you as well. We want to just help you get from doing a very minimal amount of deals to doing whatever deals are gonna get you to your goal, right? Whatever that looks like for you. If you're not doing any deals, let's get on a call, let's figure out how to get you that first one. Okay, we'll walk you step by step through it, but we're gonna do that for free for you guys, okay? We also, in addition to that, the$2,000 giveaway I was gonna give you is if you sign up for one of these coaching calls, we're gonna give you our Burfer Beginners course for free. Okay, so that was normally$2,000, just the course. We used to do some coaching along with that. That was much more expensive, but just the course alone, we were charging$2,000 for. And people are getting great results. I got a good buddy Nick Huberty, I think he's been on this podcast as well. After going through that course, I think within a year, he got like 30 doors from following the steps in that process. Now, he learned some lessons there too in that episode. So he made some mistakes that we didn't cover that in the course. So we can talk through some of the mistakes he learned. But uh get signed up for one of those. So to get that, go to Wisconsin Discount Properties.com. It says how'd you hear about it? Put the podcast in there, and then uh um we'll get you that, we'll get you the course and we'll get you set up with some coaching calls, start helping you move forward in the process and hopefully help you get to whatever that future state looks like for you. That's gonna be, you know, the life that you envision, the life that you want, living your true purpose, right? Not feeling like me where I was super depressed and like feeling hopeless, right? We want to take you from, if you're in that state, take you from that state to excitement, to hope, to growth, prosperity, right, to legacy eventually, right? Where you can leave a legacy for your kids and your family and your community, prop nonprofits that you like, be able to travel, whatever it looks like for you, we we can help you with that. And that's all free, right? Now, if you don't want to work with us or you're not local here in Wisconsin and looking to do deals, um, you don't have to be local, but if you're not really looking to do deals here in Wisconsin, but you love the episodes and the podcast, I encourage you to find somebody local or find some somebody nationally. You know, one of our early coaches was also we pivoted from the local guy to a national company that does this on a regular basis and had a lot of systems and processes. And I mean, we went exponential. We joined masterminds, and we pay a lot of money to be in these masterminds. But I'll tell you what, you look at the return on investment. I can tell you every single year, I get way more value out of those relationships, those connections of that education than what I pay in. So a couple big tips for you guys. Hopefully, this has been helpful. I would also love to hear from you guys if you have some topics that you want me to cover on a solo episode, or if you have some guests you guys want me to get on here for you for future episodes. Always looking to drag, I want to give you guys what you want, right? Let me know what you what you need, and we'll we'll get somebody on here to talk about it. If it's not me, that's an expert in that area. So appreciate you guys tuning in. If you got some value out of this, guys, we're trying to get those ratings and reviews up on all the podcasts. So please go out, give us a rating and review that really means the world to me. If you're on YouTube, that's probably the most powerful uh platform right now for anybody out here putting content out. So if you're on YouTube subscribing, commenting, and viewing those podcast episodes, so helpful. So again, appreciate you guys tuning in. We'll see you on the next episode.

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Corey Reyment

Host