Speaker 2
You will absolutely never get to where you want to get to in your life if other people are deciding for you. And so my first decision, my first deal, if we want to call it that was with myself, my first deal was, Jamil, I'm actually going to get up in the morning and I'm going to pave my path, I'm going to be the master of my own destiny. And I got into entrepreneurship. My first role in entrepreneurship wasn't real estate related. I was in a fledgling enterprise at the time. And it was a media company. What I was doing is I was calling business owners out of the yellow pages. And I was convincing them that this thing called the internet was a real thing. And they move their advertising from the yellow pages to website. And you know, I would I would cold call people I did really well at that sold hundreds of websites. But like many new entrepreneurs, I didn't really understand the business, I didn't understand what my costs were. And so every time I would sell a $600 website, I would actually lose $100. Because it costs $700 to make these things. And so I make it up, make it up and blow it up and mug your mouth. Yep, absolutely. And so I'm digging myself into this deep hole of debt. However, I'm putting myself in proximity to people that are making moves doing things and my business partner at the time, him and his father were in real estate, and they were in small developments, they were taking these old houses that were on double lots and they were bulldozing them, and then building up duplexes and making a fortune. And as I'm walking by my business partner's office, I'm hearing a conversation him and his father are having about a deal that they just completed where they made $160,000. And for a guy who's losing money every time he makes a sale, every time I get a win, I'm losing. I I interjected myself into that conversation and I asked how I could get involved. And like many people who are in traditional real estate, they didn't see an opportunity for me. They didn't see how I fit in because I didn't have any cash, I didn't have good credit. I wasn't licensed real estate agent. And so they very quickly told me, Jamil, you have nothing to do to this in this conversation. I mean, we really can't help you. But as I further listened in eavesdrop, I heard them lamenting about not having enough building lots, not having enough homes, raw materials to go and build these duplexes. And so I interjected into the conversation again, I said, Well, if you don't have enough of something, is there a way that I can help you find that? And immediately they both said, Well, yeah, if you know anybody who's selling a house on a 50 by 120 foot lot that zoned our two, we'll buy it. The next day, I'm walking my dog. And I'm walking by a house that's for rent. I had actually tried to rent the house three months earlier. But the price of the rent per month was about $300 more than I could afford. That's where my life was $300 made or break, was going to make a break where I lived. And I called the sign because it was still for rent. And I asked the lady if she would consider selling the house instead of renting the house. You know, months had passed and the house is still available. Her answer was, I sure would if the price was right. And I asked what that number was. And she said, I'll take 350 for the house. Well, now I know that I've got to sell her at $350,000. And I run my butt back to the office and have a conversation with my partner. And I asked him how much him and his dad would pay for this house. And immediately, 400,000 was the number that came off their minds. So now I have a $50,000 problem. You know, most people would look at that and say, well, why don't I just connect the dots and ask for a finder's fee? But for me, I was trying to figure out how I could become the principal in the deal. And I did what I knew how to do. So I got back to the yellow pages and I started cold calling lawyers. And I got all the way to the letter S in the lawyers section, because no lawyers would talk to me. Their secretaries and their gatekeepers would just sue me away. But this one lawyer was so fresh out of law school that he didn't have a secretary yet. So he answers his own phone, his name is David Steed. I will never forget him because he changed my life. He introduced me to the concept of being able to trade a contract, selling a contract, trading my interest in the contract. And he laid it out for me. He said, Jamil, what you need is a purchase contract. You need to go and put this lady under contract and make sure that in your buyer name, you write your name and or assignee. And then you need another contract where you sell that property to whoever, whatever buyer you've got. And then you bring those two contracts to me. And once I do all the title work and I make sure that I pay off any liens or mortgages, I'll have a check for you. And sure enough, a few days later, after everything was done, I had $47,000 in change after the lawyer took his fee. And for me, that was a life changing experience. Because you know, when I grew up in a very limited, with very limited means, my parents didn't teach me any of these things. I thought I invented this business model, right? But you know, obviously, men like Ron LeGrand had been paving the way for many of us. And I wish I had known about you. I wish I had had an understanding of the high level education that was available. I was, I know I did this deal in Canada. And, you know, your commercials or your marketing would have never even reached me there. And I'm looking at it. I'm looking at it. 20 years ago, it would have. Yeah, you would have. Yeah. Well, I wish I was paying attention, because I probably would have accelerated my life a lot quicker. But I'll tell you what, that one deal, Ron, it changed everything about the way I operated.
Speaker 3
It usually does for everybody that comes into the business. Mine was only three grand. Yeah. But it changed everything.
Speaker 2
You got a, I mean, you really started from scratch, didn't you? I mean, no idea whatsoever.
Speaker 3
So pace, give me what's your background here? You're totally different background.
Speaker 1
Totally, totally different background. I grew up in a blue collar family. And my dad was a contractor is a contractor. I learned to make all my money from using my hands, not my mouth and not my brain.
Speaker 2
You're talking relate
Speaker 1
to that. Yeah. And so, all the way through my twenties, I did what I was taught, you know, I learned from my parents how to work my guts out and love
Speaker 3
it. And work hard, work hard, put in the hours.
Speaker 2
Yeah. Good citizen. Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1
Pay your taxes. Yeah. Pay
Speaker 1
And so, I ended up getting to a point where I was doing about $25 million a year as a contractor for other people's renovations. And I ended up getting a contract with Open Door, Offerpad, Zillow. And I was doing a lot of their turns and their big renovations all over the country and multiple different states. And I ended up doing 7,000 renovations for other people before I ever took a chance on
Speaker 2
myself. Amen. Christmas. I never believed I could do it, Ron. I never
Speaker 1
believed I could do it. And the funny thing is, finally, somebody came to me and told me, why aren't you in real estate? Why aren't you in real estate? And I go, I am in real estate. I'm doing all these turns in these fix and flips. And they go, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're not in real estate. You're a service provider for the people who are in real estate. And that moment just rattled me. And I had 250 employees doing a live business, working 100 plus hours a week. I was earning a living, but I wasn't becoming
Speaker 2
wealthy. So I said that before. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1
Yeah. So I started poking around somebody directed me in the right direction. And I ended up sending out a slew of postcards to people who had pain points, right? Just like what you talked about earlier before you started interviewing us is that you go find sellers who are in distress, right? Jay Cutler. I think you guys have a Jay Connor, I'm sorry, Jay Connor has a lead that is right there on your desk. It's a foreclosure. Yeah. Right. So we start looking at foreclosures. We start looking at high equity. We start looking at probate. We start looking at all these things. And I send out my first set of mail. I ended up getting my first contract. I made $25,000 and probably about seven hours of total work.
Speaker 2
What year was that?
Speaker 1
This was 2016. No, I'm sorry, 2015. So seven years.
Speaker 3
15. So you've only been in this industry for seven years. Only
Speaker 1
seven years. Seven years.
Speaker 2
Okay. Um, it is
Speaker 1
crazy what I that what happened when I got that first $25,000 check. I said, man, I essentially here's the problem with being blue collars that if I made $25,000 on a construction job, that money went to insurance, workmen's comp, half of it went to taxes. And I'm like, man, I ended up netting $8,000 on a $25,000 profit and worked your butt off and and dealt with customers and somebody else controlled my fate. And yeah. So from that moment, I made a decision. I'm going to unravel my construction business and go full time in real estate. The second I saw that it was real and that had to
Speaker 3
been a big decision. It was
Speaker 2
a big decision.
Speaker 1
That one probably cost you a little sleep, didn't it? It took a year. I mean, most people look at that and they say, why didn't you just turn that off overnight? Am I? Are you kidding me? It's all I knew for my whole
Speaker 3
life. I'm not sure most people were capable of making that decision.
Speaker 1
No. And again, it took me 7,000 renovations for other people before I ever took a chance on myself. It's hard to
Speaker 2
imagine. So can you renovate a house today? Okay, you don't mean oh my gosh, there's no side advice.
Speaker 1
Nobody I've met on the planet that knows more about houses than I do. And it at the time I thought I was a superpower. And you know, to some degree, it is, but really it held me back. And my prior education, my parents, I tell people all the time, I had the strongest engine, right? My desire, my heart, my urgency, I wanted to accomplish something. But my engine that I had was in the wrong vehicle. Yeah. And it can only go so fast so far. And on top of it, the vehicle I was in, I felt like somebody else had control of the wheel the whole time.
Speaker 1
did. Which they did. And so jump in the real estate and very quickly, what I what I do now in real estate is we do a little bit of everything because we go after motivated sellers and as that motivated seller lead comes into our pipeline, we make a determination. Is that a fix and flip for us in our own backyard? Is that a subject to deal? We want to hold as a rental or short term deal? Is that a seller finance deal? Is that an apartment deal? We just did our first $100 million acquisition last week. Oh, yeah, 440 units in North Carolina. I am beyond delighted to get to think that I didn't believe in myself. And we just raised $51 million in equity to go and take down a behemoth nine figure purchase that I now hold in my portfolio. It was just who I was learning from was the biggest difference. It was the biggest difference. And so at the beginning of this interview, I wanted to make sure we gave you that moment because, Ron, you do not get enough praise for how hard you work and your team and what you guys put into changing people's lives because it was somebody just like you that said, here's the here's the right way. Here's the correct way to go. And the person was as convince not as convincing as you, but they were convincing enough to get me to take action and do the things. And
Speaker 3
so, well, you mentioned the word toward is the team, right? I just show up and smile and talk and do what I do. They're doing everything else. Like right now there's a team putting this together. And without that team, we wouldn't even be here today and same as you. We remember your big team. So today you still buy houses, right? Yep, we buy
Speaker 1
we buy a lot of houses. I have a little I have close to 700 doors now under under in our portfolio.
Speaker 3
Okay, bad. It was the apartments.
Speaker 1
Yep. So we've got I've got 250 single family homes.
Speaker 3
Yeah. No kidding. How old are you?
Speaker 3
God, it should be illegal to be where you're at at 39 years. I didn't even start to last 35 right
Speaker 2
now. Right. So man, well, you've
Speaker 3
accomplished a lot. So I
Speaker 2
want to know you guys, I want to know how
Speaker 2
as an interesting story in itself. Well, here's here's a great story. So
Speaker 1
as a contractor working for other people, what I thought was a really great marketing strategy was to go to Fix and Flippers. And you're probably in a cringe when you hear this, Ron. Oh,
Speaker 3
I've heard it all before.
Speaker 1
I would go to Fix and Flippers and I would say, hey, how about you let me fund all your construction and then you pay me when you find your buyer and your buyer pays off, you know, buys the house from you that then I can get paid there. Well, I got into a really bad situation doing this where somebody in Phoenix had owed me a lot of money, a lot of money. And the only person I knew that had ever done business with this nefarious character was Jamil. And I'd never met Jamil. I just knew that he had done a couple of deals with this guy. And I was like, I need to get some insight on how to handle this human being because he is what he is. So I reach out to Jamil on Instagram. Thank goodness for social media. I reach out to on Instagram and I go, Hey, I need some help. I need some advice. I hear you're just like this godly figure in wholesale in Arizona. I need your help. I'm doing construction for this guy. It owes me hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it's climbing every single day. So we sit down and very long story short, Jamil says, this guy is running a Ponzi scheme on you. Here's the proof. And he showed me Bankrecker, not Bankrecker, but public data showing that this guy was adding seconds, thirds, fourths to every single one of his houses. And he was running a Ponzi scheme, just robbing Peter to pay Paul. And I was Peter and I was Paul. And I didn't run away. And Jamil kept telling me run away, run away. Instead, Ron, I dug myself deeper in a hole. And I ended up losing over a million dollars the day that this guy filed bankruptcy. He sent me a bankruptcy letter the day my daughter was born. Oh, my god. And he filed bankruptcy on a million dollars to me and about 15 million dollars
Speaker 3
to other people. They're expensive. They sure are. They
Speaker 1
sure are. And so here's what happened with Jamil and I during that time, Jamil essentially came to me, said, let me help you dig out of this hole by helping you deal a lot more real estate. And so we started collaborating, even though Jamil and I compete, we compete on the same deals, Ron, we don't actually own a real estate business together. We compete on the same exact
Speaker 1
And so for years, Jamil and I did hundreds of transactions, made millions of dollars together, but we were chasing a lot of the same deals. Now, how we got the TV show is something pretty special. So Jamil and I are now kind of well known in Arizona because we would collaborate on stuff and we'd go to meetups and we'd go to events and we'd show up together. And people are like, man, these are two guys competing against each other but are helping each other out. And it was a beautiful thing. And we created an atmosphere and an environment in Arizona that other people started doing the same thing. Well, one day somebody came to us and said, you guys need to take this message on the road. So in 2008, or I'm sorry, 2018 Jamil and I spent about $180,000 of our own money flying around the country doing free meetups and just meeting people and showing them what collaboration and real estate really could do for you. And we got gained a lot of attraction. We called it Payson America or Payson Jamil Do America was the name of our tour. Duke. Yeah. And we I mean, we're on that tour right now, Ron. Here we are. 2022. We are on that tour right now. I'm Jamil and I are both staring out at the Austin skyline. We were in Boise on Monday. We were in Houston on Wednesday, Austin last night and Dallas tonight. And all we do is we just go around and we tell people you need somebody to collaborate with. You need to go and learn from the right people. We have nothing to sell. We leave that to, you know, other people and we say, you know, go listen to Ron, go listen to these people, but you need somebody to collaborate with. And so one year in 2020, we get home from a really long surge of these back to the back meetings. And I decide I'm going to go buy a flip in my meet, you know, for these three or four days we're off before we go back on the road. And I'm getting a deal from a wholesaler. Wholesaler is sending me a deal. He goes, hey, if you can commit to 200,000 deals yours, I go great. Give me, give me, send me the contract at 200,000. He comes back five minutes later, Ron and he says, hey, I've got somebody else at 205. I go, come on, man, you just told me 200,000. All right, great. I'll be at 205. And this is don't play this game with me, man. Don't play this game with me. Comes back five minutes later. Hey, man, this guy's bumping up back up to 210. Am I like, what the heck? So what do I do? I text my buddy, Jamil, I go, Hey, is this freaking guy out to lunch? He keeps but bidding me up. And Jamil goes, I'm the
Speaker 4
other guy. I'm so wrong. You know, this is that's
Speaker 1
the nature of mine in Jamil's relationship is that we I go, look, let's just tell this wholesaler that we're going to buy the deal together. And then that way he doesn't feel pinched to make a decision on who he sells it to. And so Jamil and I buy this flip together, which is pretty rare. Usually we're kind of assigning him to each other. And we go and make a YouTube video about why we collaborate and how it's changed our lives together and how this brotherhood that we could be competing has been the greatest relationship in our lives. And a television network executive picks that YouTube video up, falls in love with the spirit of collaboration over competition. And we get a call from A&E the head executive at A&E. They skipped the sizzle reel. They skipped the pilot pilot. We didn't have to have a pilot. They just said, we're going straight to series. We love what you guys are all about. And you know, maybe there's some questions in here. So I'll skip to the very end. But Jamil and I now are the number one television show on A&E, a national good number one show. Really? We've signed a contract for six years. They're already talking about spinoff shows and doing all sorts of stuff. And all of that came from getting into real estate and helping each other rather than looking at each other's competition. All right. Well,
Speaker 3
I'm going to come back to the show. Yes.
Speaker 2
All right. First, I'm not through with you guys.