How to Fix Low Cash Flow and a “Slow” Agent (Rookie Reply)

Ashley:
Welcome back to the Real Estate Rookie podcast where we tackle the real world questions. New and growing investors are asking every day.

Tony:
And today’s episode is proof that no matter where you are in your journey, whether you’re closing on your first deal or managing 20 plus units, real estate brings new challenges at almost every level.

Ashley:
We’re breaking down three powerful questions from rookies at very different stages. One, struggling with a slow agent, one launching a wholesaling business in college and one, realizing that a 23 unit portfolio doesn’t always mean predictable income. This is the Real Estate Rookie podcast. I’m Ashley Kehr

Tony:
And I am Tony j Robinson. And with that, let’s get into our first question for today. So this question says, Hey everyone, I’m new to real estate and I need some advice. I’m currently working with a buyer’s agent, but I’m getting really frustrated. Each time I see a house I like and send it to her, we eventually go to see it. When I tell her to put in the offer, she won’t do it right away. By the time she finally tries, usually three or four days later, the house already has an accepted offer. I’ve already signed a buyer’s agent agreement with her, so I’m not sure what my options are. Has anyone experienced this? Is there a way to change agents or to get out of the agreement? What would you do? In my situation, thanks in advance for any advice. This is like a tricky situation because I’m not super knowledgeable of the new NAR agreement. And for Ricky’s that are maybe unfamiliar the National Association of Realtors, there was some big changes that happened to how agents and buyers of real estate have to work with each other. Now you have to sign this exclusive agreement with them. Have you signed one yet, Ash?

Ashley:
No, I haven’t. But my agent, when I listed my flip house back in the fall, this is when it first came into motion and we didn’t get any showings right away. And my agents said part of that is because buyers don’t want to sign this document and agents aren’t going to give you a showing unless you sign this document. And so it was kind of scary. It’s like, oh my God, we’re not going to sell this house. So that was my first experience with it as to if you wanted to get a showing, you had to sign a document with the agent. And so I’m not sure how there’s a workaround now that has been made so that you don’t have to do that. But another thing is too is with paying the commission. So I had another house that I just sold and when we had an offer come in, the buyer’s agent said, the seller will be paying my commission.

Ashley:
My buyers will not, because as it kind of the rule is the buyer and the seller are each responsible for the commission to whoever, but they put in their offer that I would be paying, which is what the standard was forever. But now you can use that as a negotiation tactic. So they put in their offer that we would be paying the commission, which was fine. The other piece they put in was that I would be paying, my agent had put in the listing that it was a 5% commission and they asked for 6% commission total. So it was three to the buyer and three to the seller. And my agent actually said, no, we’re or my agent said, no, we’re going to keep it at the 5%. So that’s just the little bit I’ve had to deal with it. I haven’t gone to any showings to have to sign with an agent to be exclusive with them. There was one time I did that years and years ago, signed it with someone and I have to say it was the worst real estate agent I ever worked with. They lost my deposit money, my earnest money deposit, tried to blame it on the secretary that worked in the brokerage office and they ended up having it sitting on their desk for days and days. And I almost lost the deal because they never actually handed it over to the seller.

Tony:
So I actually signed one of these about a year ago for a flip. We bought in a city I’d never really worked in before. And I just wanted someone who is knowledgeable of that specific city. And I’m looking at it here now, and the first thing that jumps out to me is that the broker has a non-exclusive right to represent me in transactions as a buyer. Now there is a section here where they could have made that exclusive, but that box wasn’t checked. So I think the first thing that I would do if I’m the person who’s asking this question is go back and review your contract and just try and get an understanding of is it exclusive or is it non-exclusive? Because if it’s not exclusive, there’s another section here that says, in order for me to cancel this, all I have to do is give them written notice. It says cancellation upon receipt of notice. So that means all I have to do is let them know in some sort of official form, email, text, whatever, and I’m canceling the contract and then we can walk away. And either way, it was only for a 30 day period as well. So I think my advice for this person would be to go back, review your contract and try and understand what are your levers to step away from this without causing too much of a scene or be violated in the terms of that agreement.

Ashley:
Yeah, I think having the conversation with the agent, have you at least communicated to her that you would offers put in same day, and if she’s too busy, could she refer you to somebody else? And then she’ll still get her. Most agents, if they’re referred to someone from another agent, they give them a referral fee or a percentage of the commission, things like that. So that could still go into play there. So I think there are options, but you need to maybe even talk to the broker of the firm that she works at that is contracted with her and say the issue that’s going on. Because really your exclusivity really I think comes or your contract comes down to working with the broker that if maybe they have another agent within house, they can just transfer that to that because the majority of the commission anyways goes to the brokerage too.

Tony:
That’s actually a good point. It’s really even the contract that I was just reading, it was with the brokerage, not with that specific agent. So there’s other brokers or agents within that brokerage might be a good step as well. But I like your point ash of just have a conversation with the agent and maybe reset expectations. And I remember the very first agent that I worked with, and this was in Shreveport, in Louisiana, and I was feeling a very similar way and I’d actually flown out there, I think I was visiting some family out there and we just happened to be walking some real estate and I gave him that feedback as well. I was like, Hey dude, I feel like I’m not really a big priority for you and it’s fine if I’m not, but just let me know that so I can go get a different agent.

Tony:
And he was like, yeah, I totally, I hear you. I got you. Message received loud and clear. And he was great after that. So I think just having that heart to heart around like, Hey, here are my expectations. Here’s where you’re at. How can we bridge that gap? And I think the final piece that I’ll add is that part of being a real estate investor or really just an entrepreneur, small business owner in general, means you have to have difficult conversations. And I think the sooner we as Ricky investors can get past that fear of the uncomfortable conversations, the easier it’s going to be for you to handle problems quickly and efficiently without them dragging on to these big long ordeals. So there’s a book that I read that I would highly recommend for all of our Ricky audience. It’s called Crucial Conversations. I can’t recall who the author was, but I read it, gosh, I dunno, maybe my early twenties. And it’s a book that just kind of stuck with me. So crucial conversations, but you got to get comfortable with being uncomfortable in those tough conversations. Otherwise you’re going to be the one that loses almost every single time.

Ashley:
Next, we are going to go over how you can get started in real estate while being in college or even just working at W2. So stay tuned because our last question we are going to hear from an investor who built a 12 property portfolio and it is not performing with as much cashflow as they expected. We’ll be right back. Okay, we are back from our short break. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out our show sponsors. Okay, this question is from the BiggerPockets forums. Hello everyone. I am a rising sophomore at the University of South Carolina and I want to get my first property before the school year ends. I have been intrigued by investing since I was 14, and as I have grown older, I have realized that real estate investing was a field I wanted to enter for about a year now, I have been researching real estate.

Ashley:
I started going to RIAs about seven months ago. Those are real estate meetups and I have been building a network since then. While I have been home for the summer, I have been interning and mentoring with a very successful wholesalers slash investor who I met at one of the Rios I attended. At this point, I have learned a lot and have had great hands-on experience and opportunities with the momentum I have built over the last year. I do not want to stay stagnant. For me, the next logical move seemed to be starting my own business. I’m starting a wholesale business in an effort to raise capital, get my own experience with starting a business, learn find deals, and to get started with a long and fruitful career in real estate. I don’t want to stay primarily wholesaling properties and I plan on using wholesaling to expand into flip some rentals.

Ashley:
My biggest goal is to acquire my first rental property and house Hackett for my junior year of school. I know it’ll be challenging to do all of this while a student, but I also believe that now is the best time to get started. I have about 10 K saved up in cash stocks in crypto, and I also plan on getting a job serving or catering while I’m at school. I would greatly appreciate any advice or knowledge you all would be willing to share. Also, if there are any agents or investors in Columbia, South Carolina, I would love to have a chat wholesaling. A controversial topic here, Tony, we haven’t had any hot topics lately to talk about, but I guess first, should we go through and explain what wholesaling is? I feel like we honestly haven’t talked about it in so long at all.

Tony:
It definitely has been a while. Yeah, so the basic idea of wholesaling is that you are selling contracts for real estate. So let’s say we will use an example. Let’s say that my neighbor, maybe they pass away, right? It’s a sweet old lady. She passes away. I’m aware of what’s going on. I see the kids walking up in the driveway one day I go talk to them and say, Hey, I’m a real estate investor. If you guys don’t want the house, I can help you get rid of it. And they’re like, oh my gosh, thank you. Because we have no idea. We don’t want this house, we don’t want to have to deal with it. And I say, okay, hey, the house might be worth 300 K if it’s all fixed up, but it’s pretty old, pretty dated, going to need a lot of repairs.

Tony:
I’ll give you 150 K for it. And they’re like, deal done. So now I enter into a contract with those kids and I go out and I say, Ashley, hey, I’ve got this house. It’s worth 300 K. I’m going to sell you the contract for $170,000. Now remember, I’m under contract with the original owners at one 50. I’m selling that contract to Ashley 4 1 70. I get to keep that spread of $20,000 for selling Ashley the rights to that contract. I get paid on the day of closing. Ashley gets her keys, sellers get their original one 50, we all walk away happy. Alright? So that’s the general idea of wholesaling is that you’re getting properties under contract and then selling the rights of that contract to other real estate investors. Now, one big caveat, and neither Ashley nor myself are wholesalers, so we’re probably not super UpToDate, but just know that states are starting to regulate the laws around wholesaling because for the longest you didn’t need a license. You could be unlicensed to buy and sell real estate contracts. But I think every state is starting to adopt different rules and regulations around what it means to be a wholesaler. Are you actually an agent or operating as an agent? So just make sure you check with your local state laws around you or do you not need a license to do this?

Ashley:
And technically, I did wholesale a deal once before I did assign a duplex to somebody else once I wholesaler here.

Tony:
I think we’ve done three wholesale deals, whereas we wholesale to other folks, but definitely more of a one-off than a core part of the business.

Ashley:
And the reason it was one-off is because it was a very easy thing for me to do at that time. But wholesaling, it can be easy if the deals fall in your lap and you have buyers lined up. But this is a very, very active business. I mean, James Dard probably the most successful real estate investor that I know. He started out full sailing, he door knocked for one year before he even got a deal. Every day after work he’d go out knocking doors, knocking doors, and it was one year before he got a deal I think. So there’s ways that you can become a wholesaler and it can be very cheap to get started, but that takes a lot of your time. If you have that time and you have that motivation to grind, grind, grind, even if you’re not seeing results right away, then wholesaling might be for you.

Ashley:
But you can take the money route where you’re investing a lot into how you’re finding deals. So that’s paying for software simply where you can go in and you can pull lists where they’re going to give you the information for all the properties. You can narrow down what type of property you want with your buy box. Then you can also narrow down the list to the type of seller. So if somebody is in pre foreclosure, somebody’s going through a divorce, or if they live out of state and it’s a rental, maybe they’re more motivated and you can get a list of contacts and then you pay for direct mail to send a letter out to them, or you do skip tracing and that’s where you get their phone number and you call them recently has a ton of AI features where you, I’ve tested ’em a couple of times and it is really incredible.

Ashley:
You can have an AI agent actually answer the phone when somebody calls, get all the information you need and you feel like you’re having a real conversation with somebody else. And you guys all know me, that’s perfect for me to not have to answer the phone to use an AI agent. But wholesaling takes time and it can take some money to get started in it depending on how you’re actually going to try to get leads. But then that’s not the only side of it. You have to have a buyer’s list, you have to have that pool of people that you can actually assign the contract to. So I think make sure the whole ins and outs of, like Tony said, the legal aspects of can you actually be a wholesaler without a license and go that way. But I wanted to give a couple other options too, like $10,000.

Ashley:
I’m not sure of the market in South Carolina where he lives is how much the prices for a house. But could you house hack, buy a cheap single family home, get a FHA loan for three and a half percent down and use that $10,000 when you make the offer, get some seller credits so that can even take more off of your down payment that you have to actually bring to the table. So could you house hack and rent out the other rooms to kind of get yourself started? Another option is to become a real estate agent. You could do, if you’re going to wholesale, you could become an agent as well and actually do on market properties. So I think there’s other avenues besides just wholesaling to actually get started in real estate too.

Tony:
And something else I want to call out too is that looks like he says I’m a rising sophomore, so it looks like school year is about to start here, which means what roughly nine months maybe until the end of the year, end of the school year. And he said, Hey, my goal is to get my first property before the school year ends. That means you’ve got nine months give or take to get that first deal. And I just want to go back to what Ashley said earlier of James Dard knocking on doors for a year before he got his first wholesale deal. And I highlight that because I just want to make sure you have the right expectations from a timeline perspective around how long will it actually take to get that first wholesale deal. And once you get the deal, then you still got to go out and find the deal to buy, right?

Tony:
So there’s kind of two big dominoes that need to fall here. So I love the hustle, I love the motivation, but I feel like the kind of ends of the spectrum that we see, our younger investors tend to be overzealous and think that they can take down the world in nine months are folks and maybe our millennials and whatever generation is after that, they tend to be the opposite where they just don’t take enough action and they’re kind of stuck in analysis paralysis. So how can we get both of you to operate more so in the middle? I love the hustle. I just want to make sure we’ve got good expectations here. Alright, we’re going to take a short break, but when we get back, we have a question from an investor who built a portfolio of 12 properties but isn’t getting the cashflow they actually expected.

Tony:
We’ll be right back after this. Alright. Hey guys, welcome back. So we are here on our final question. This one comes from Daniel. Daniel says, I’ve been investing in real estate since 2017 and I would appreciate some perspective. I currently own 12 properties totaling 23 units across four different markets. The portfolio’s worth about 4.2 million at a 33%. LTV gross rent come in at 34,000 per month. Mortgage payments sold us $6,200 per month. And expenses, insurance, taxes, property management, HOA are roughly nine K per month On paper. This setup should produce around 12 k per month in net cashflow. But in reality, after accounting for vacancies, repairs and turnovers, I’m consistently left with only seven K. The gap between projected and actual cashflow has been frustrating. Some additional context, 13 units are less than 10 years old in a minus to B plus areas. 10 units are older but well-maintained in C class neighborhoods.

Tony:
I see no significant difference in maintenance or turnover costs between these property types. This portfolio was meant to fund my early retirement, but the cashflow has proven inconsistent and unpredictable. I’m now considering whether I should sell a few properties and reposition first. Let me say congratulations. What a great spot to be in to have built up a $4 million portfolio, 33% LTV sounds like he got a good amount of equity in this portfolio as well. And he says 33% LTV, which means that his loan balance is only 33% of that 4.2 million. And if that’s true, I mean you’re sitting on a lot of equity right now as well, which I think should also factor into this decision. But I guess hearing this question, Ashley, what is your initial thoughts? You’ve got obviously a lot more long-term rental experience than I do. Are the numbers that he’s looking at that he’s routed off, do those sound reasonable? Do they sound too high, too low? What’s your initial take?

Ashley:
Well, the first thing is to look at if he has this much equity, he most likely put a lot of cash down when he purchased these properties. I think it said he started investing in 2017. So I mean maybe they appreciated with him putting 20% down or whatever on these properties, but it seems like he must have put at least 20% down on each of them if their investment properties, I’m not sure how he bought that, but that does play a factor. If you have that much equity of that much cash, you should be cash flowing more if your loan payments are only 30% loan to value of your whole portfolio. So I would be interested to see what the cash on cash return is for these properties and see what that actually comes out to besides just the cashflow. Another thing that I thought of too as you were reading this off is for him, he is the manager or if he has a property manager, as he sat down and actually gone through line item by line item, looking at every single expense of each property to see what’s happening.

Ashley:
When I had a property manager, my water bill significantly, significantly increased and it was because the toilet was constantly running and the tenant never reported it. And the property management company just has a payables person who’s just paying the bills, not really like, oh yep, they pay the water bill every month. I’m paying it. Not going back and looking and saying, oh, why has this increased? So just different things like that that maybe your property management company doesn’t do. The asset management piece, maybe could you quote out your insurance? When’s the last time you got insurance quotes on all your properties to see if you could actually get cheaper insurance somewhere else with maintaining the same coverage that you want. So I think just kind of doing a full analysis of your properties and seeing where that money is going and if there is ways to cut money.

Ashley:
The next thing would be looking at increasing rents. Is there any way to increase rents or are they already at market rents doing an analysis going on BiggerPockets using the rent estimator tool to see what other people are renting properties for in that area. So kind of doing that little breakdown. That would be my first step is really analyzing the properties to see where each expense is going and why it’s not performing well. I think after I did that, I would look and say, okay, these properties are not performing well, and those would be the ones that I unload and that’s what I have done before. I’ve sold some properties because they’re just not performing as well as my other ones and I just want to cut them loose and then I can use that money to invest into something else.

Tony:
Yeah, you read my mind, Ashton. I think there’s nothing wrong with getting rid of a property that isn’t serving its purpose anymore. And if there is a property where maybe it happens to be the one that drives a lot more of your maintenance and repairs and expenses, then that’s obviously a good candidate. But I think the other candidates are, do you have certain properties or maybe you have a lot of equity and maybe there isn’t a lot of maintenance headache, but the cashflow you’re getting in relation to the equity is a big mismatch. And could you sell that property and redeploy that elsewhere? There is the one big beautiful Bill act that just got passed and one of the things that it did was preserve the 10 31 exchange, which allows you to sell investment properties and defer those capital gains taxes. You reinvest those funds into another real estate deal.

Tony:
So with the amount of equity that you have, I wonder if there’s an opportunity to maybe redeploy that capital into something that produces more cashflow or that maybe has less turnover, it has less maintenance expenses or whatever it may be. But either way, I think to Ashley’s point, a full thorough review to try and understand what is the actual root cause of this delta that you’re seeing. And I don’t know if you’ll ever get to the 12 K because vacancies and maintenance repair are going to happen, so why we underwrite them into our deal? But I don’t know, vacancies, maybe 10% repairs and maintenance and CapEx, maybe another 10%. So are you within those general rules of thumb? And if you are, then maybe just accept that maybe you don’t get to 12 K, maybe you get to nine K, and maybe that that’s a reasonable number for your portfolio. But I think it starts with Ashley’s point of just doing a really strong deep dive of the portfolio to see where the problems are.

Ashley:
You could also look at your strategy. So these are long-term rentals. Is there an opportunity to turn some of the units into a midterm rental or a short-term rental? Oftentimes that can generate more cashflow if you’re in the right market for that. So that could always be an option. You’re going to have to invest more cash obviously, to furnish these units and get them rented. But I would be interested to see if you were to pivot strategies in some of the units, if that would be able to increase your cashflow on those properties too.

Tony:
Or you could do, I dunno if you’ve heard this story, Ashley, but I saw it not too long ago and it was the craziest thing, but there was a FedEx founder, Fred Smith, have you heard this story of him going to Vegas?

Ashley:
No, I don’t think so.

Tony:
FedEx was on its last leg and he took, I don’t know, the last whatever, $10,000 that FedEx had, and he went to Vegas and put it all on black and he won. And that was the money that he used to put back into the business to keep it going. So if you really just want to get spicy with it, just take all that equity, go to Vegas, throw it on black and see what happens.

Ashley:
That’s why we’re having B PE Con in Las Vegas. So anybody that has, that’s not good, well pull out all your cash or we’re all get to stand around the roulette table and see what happens. This is awful advice. So it’s going to clip this big of us and this is what real estate rookie promotes GaN. Seriously, if you guys want to come to BP Con, maybe Tony and I will each take $20 and put it on Redder Black and you. But yeah, we’re going to BP Con in Los Las Vegas in October, so hope you guys can come and learn some actual real estate investing tips and not gambling tips because I have none of those. Thank you guys so much for watching this episode of Rookie Reply. I’m Ashley. He’s Tony, and we’ll see you guys on the next episode.