Welcome to The Deal Pen, a podcast that digs into the details of untold stories from crafty real estate investors. And now here's your host Avi Rosowski.

All right. We are live with everyone's favorite uncle, uncle Carl, Carl Spielvogel. How you doing tonight, Carl?

Avi Rasowsky

Doing great. Doing great.

Karl Spielvogel

I'm looking forward to chatting through a variety of interesting stories with you. We were just talking before we went live here, but you have so many stories that it's almost challenging to figure out where to start. But I think one of the places that we could dive into, and we'll talk about how we met and everything. You told me recently about your background getting into, before real estate, getting into owning franchises. Do you want to talk about that?

Avi Rasowsky

Yeah, we'll jump into that. Well, I was going to school at Appalachian State in Boone, and there was a subway there and the owner was financing it to the manager. What year is this? Approximately what year? Uh, probably 85, 86, 1986, but probably before you were born. But anyway, I was three years old, three years old. So when I was three years old, so these, what happened was the manager said, I'm not going to be able to make the payments. When you talk to owners, we talked to the owner, he wanted 35,000 cash, which was a decent price back then.

This is to buy a franchise, subway franchise.

Franchise because it was breaking even maybe losing a little bit of money. So we tried to raise the money. We went to our family and everybody and they're like, yeah, it sounds like a great idea, but we're not going to give you any money. So the manager walked out and the stores closed for two days. We called the owner up. He said, you know what? I said, look, here's the situation. The manager's gone and the store's closed and we only have $1,000. And he said, well, get back in there and open. I won't see what he's opened the fricking store back up and I'll sell it to you for $1,000. I dropped out of college a week before exams on a handshake deal and we bought the store for $1,000.

So what was the agreement though? You said, okay, here's a thousand and what?

And we'll finance the 35,000 for me. Okay. So he just, so I had a problem. I didn't have a thousand dollars. So I got a partner to put the $1,000 in, and I put a Volvo station wagon in, and it got so tight at some point, and the food order would come in, we wouldn't have enough money to pay for it all. So we'd pay as much as we could and send it back. I mean, it was really tough, but what turned it around was we ended up calling the college paper. and said, hey, we're two students. We just bought Subway. And they wrote an article, Two Students Buy Subway. And that was one of the things that saved us or we would have drowned and never made it.

So the business ended up kind of taking off with that press release.

The press release. And then Subway wasn't baking its own bread. Long story is I got my grandma to loan me $3,500 to buy a bread baking oven. We started baking our bread. So a couple of things like that got us going and we were able to increase the sales.

Amazing. Amazing. So you, I mean, obviously we'll, we'll dig into real estate as we go here, but we talk all the time about creative deal structuring and real estate and, and you actually, it sounds like learn how to structure deals creatively out of necessity. Yeah.

Yeah. I just called him up and I said, I got a thousand dollars. I want to buy it. What can we do? And he's like, well, I'll finance it to you. I'm like, okay.

about how new was Subway? I mean, were they around for years?

There was probably 200 stores nationwide. Okay. Maybe 400. There wasn't a lot at the time. Okay, wow. I use a lot of creative ways. We don't go, but I was able to do a lot of stores where I get the partner to put in the cash. I would lease the equipment for my partner. So I've learned this being real creative to open store. I was really good at opening them, terrible at running them.

Okay. But, but basically 40 years, that's almost 40 years ago, you were doing creative deal structures on restaurants. And then, so, so then how did you get from that point in your life to like getting out of the restaurant business and your next phase?

Well, a friend of mine said, Hey, I always want to get into real estate, but I thought you had a money and credit. So I never really investigated. A friend of mine said, Hey, you should go to this program. This guy, Ron LeGrand, he's got all this really cool stuff on how to buy and sell real estate. Signed up for his course. And I went and then I kept up learning. I went to meetups and it took me nine months to get my first deal. But that's how I got involved into real estate.

There was a lot of Ronald Grant education on, I assume, buying on terms and selling on terms.

Buying on terms, creative stuff, options, taking seconds, a lot of really cool stuff. It was very eye-opening.

Yeah. He has quite the library of curriculum still to this day, as many people know, I'm sure. So what was the, I mean, not to dwell on the nine months of getting the first deal, but how did you end up landing that? What was the path to actually break in?

Um, a realtor. I went to realtors and he would bring me deals and, um, uh, then I would just buy them and finance them. So that's how I got in just buying almost retail, you know, uh, and that's how I got into it. So.

And you, what was your exit renting, flipping, renting?

We were just renting and I hated us terrible at it. It was just pain in the ass, but that's how we got involved. And then I started getting into the creative stuff and that's, that's where we really thrived.

So this is semi-intentional me asking this, but there's a phase of your life where you got out of real estate, right?

Oh yeah. I did a lot of stuff. I taught, I sort of thought I was a bad-ass and then I lost everything in 2008. I went from being a bad-ass to being a dumb-ass and I lost everything and got back. I went into the car business, did terrible at that. And then I got back into 2016 doing real estate again.

All right. So only because, and this is obviously, I know a lot of people have PTSD from, from the 08 days, but whatever you're okay sharing, I mean, I don't want to dig into like any salty wounds or anything, but what was the, what were the main issues for you personally? Cause everyone had their own.

I was buying a lot of stuff on I'm getting greats. great deals on places that were going up in value. So I was borrowing hard money to refinance out. I don't care that I'm losing cash flow, but I've got all these great deals in great areas and they'd be worth a whole lot of money. I was doing a little bit of flipping and wholesaling. And then 2008 came along, I couldn't sell them. I couldn't refinance them. And so I lost everything. But it taught me a great lesson that don't just buy for appreciation and stuff. You have to do stuff for cashflow. But yeah, it was very humbling to lose everything.

Yeah, I can imagine. So you had to sell and get rid of stuff and basically take a hit on your whole portfolio.

Yeah, I lost everything. I've worked for my whole life. Even when I sold my Subways, I dumped everything in. So I went to being just barely getting by and you know, flipping used cars illegally. Can I say that? You know? Yeah.

You know, I'm not here to judge. It's not, not condoning anything that's illegal, but so you would flip cars. You would ultimately like you got into actually, I wouldn't say flipping illegally, but I've just, uh, creative stuff with the titles, creative stuff that the state may not have, uh, loved approved of. Yeah, exactly. Okay.

Just trying to survive. So,

All right. And then did you ultimately build the car business to a point where that was your sole income?

Yeah. We were just barely getting by. We were doing a lot of buy here, pay here, but that didn't go very well.

What was the issue? Were people not paying?

People not paying, some of the cars breaking down. We would try to fix them for next to nothing. A lot of late night repos. Did you repo yourself? Yep. We were repoing late at night at two in the morning and people threatened to kill us from time to time. What's great about that business, it taught me how to deal with difficult situations. It taught me how to deal with difficult people. And so it did help me even though we didn't really make any money.

Yeah. I, uh, I got a call from a buyer once on a property down in, uh, great fall, South Carolina. And he was, he, you know, I have signs in front of all my properties and he said, Oh yeah, I look, I'm looking at this house. Uh, what do you want for it? And I asked him, we started to talk about what he does for a business. Cause I, you know, I want to know about people's income when they're, when they're buying from me. And he said, Oh, I do, I do repos. I own my own repo business. And, um, I forget how we got into it, but he said, yeah, I wear a Bulletproof vest everywhere I go. Cause I've got shot at multiple times, repoing cars. I'm like, that does not sound like fun.

So it's not. So luckily I got out of that. And then, um, but this is real interesting. I'll tell you how I got back into real estate. Yeah. So I went back to a bunch of real estate meetups. I'm just trying to get my way back in.

This is post what year about? 2016. Okay. All right.

So just about eight years ago. Eight years ago. So I'm dead broke, a hundred thousand in debt. I'm going to these real estate meetups and I ran into a guy named Mitch Young. Okay. He's a guy that we'd done some deals together and stuff. And he said, look, I got this guy. I won't say his name, that his property's going to tax sale. If you can find him and get under a contract, I'll give you half the deal. Well, I Googled the guy and pulled up his resume and we still had the car lot and he was a used car turnaround specialist. Okay. So I called him up. Actually, I'll tell you, his name was Lee Arthur. Lee Arthur called him and said, Hey, I hear you're used car turnaround specialist. My car dealership is struggling. I don't have a lot of money. Can you help me out? I said, yeah, I'll come up this weekend. And I think he charged like 500 bucks plus, but he took pity on me. So he came up and then I called Mitch back and I said, Hey, Mitch, you know, that guy that you can't find the author. Yeah. I can't find him anywhere. He said, he's in my office. And it's just like, what he's in my office. So Mitch came down, met him and we said, Hey, do you own any properties in Charlotte? He goes, no, I don't know anymore. So long story. We let him go back to Columbia, South Carolina. We called him up. couple of days later and said, hey, Mitch told me that you have some property, that you still have a piece of property that's going to tax sale. He goes, yeah, someone just called me and offered me $35,000. I'm like, Well, we'll match that. Lee Arthur, you know us, you know? So we went down, we signed the contract, bargained for $35,000, and we sold it and we made $58,000 on the deal. But that's sort of crazy. This is some of the crazy stuff that I do is like, I hired somebody to get to know them to get the deal. I know it's crazy, but it works.

So his business was actually to come in and turn around used car dealerships.

Yeah. He also worked at a dealership and he did that on the weekends.

Oh my God. Okay. So, so when he, all right, let me back up for a second. You, when you went to these meetups, you, you were just kind of getting into it. Was this your first deal getting back into the first deal, getting back in the business?

I had no money. I had no nothing. And Mitch was like, I know you're good at this. We've done deals. Just find the guy and get it under contract. Maybe you have to deal. That's amazing.

So 58K profit. And you had done, prior to the crash in 08, you had done difficult-to-find sellers as well or no? A little bit.

We had done a little bit of that, but this is when we ended up getting more into difficult-to-find sellers and heirs and things like that.

Okay. Well, I'll tell you. So I moved to Charlotte in 2019 and I didn't know you until maybe a little bit after that, but, um, I bought a D I had heard your name. I had seen some, some stuff you were putting out about some, you know, crazy uncle Carl deals. And I, I don't think, well, you probably know some of the story. I bought a deal from a couple investors and we don't have to say the names just for practical reasons. There you go. Okay.

Brandon Maxwell.

There we go. Yeah. Yeah. Brandon. It wasn't me. That was Carl. So, so Brandon. Yeah. And, um, and, and he had a partner at the time as well. And he, so they had a post on Facebook about a deal they were trying to get rid of. And I said, I'll, I'll look at it. And it was a crazy squatter situation. And, um, long story short, we, we agreed to numbers and I said, look, we, I'd love to do this deal with you. Do you mind sharing with me how you got the deal? Uh, cause I know that's like, some people don't want to share and some people do. And they said, yeah, we'll, we'll tell you, we, we just learned everything we know from Carl. And I was like, I was like, wait, wait, what do you know from Carl? Like, what does he do? Cause I didn't really know anything about what you did. And then they told me about, I mean, at the time you were doing a, um, like educational mastermind for people teaching a lot of different strategies. And I was like, all right, I got to learn all about this. And, and so you were the first one in this market that I was like, Maybe I should look at my marketing a little bit differently. Cause I was doing a lot of stuff inbound, like getting people to come in from Google and other inbound sources. And then, and in my mind, oh, that's the best. And then I saw the types of deal sizes you're doing. Do you want to talk maybe about the, like just the overall framework of how you think about the types of deals you look at?

Yeah, I'll tell you like the type of deals we go after, like we do a lot of property tax delinquents. I probably shouldn't tell people this because they're going to start doing it too. And we just, we do the research. There's always a problem. Maybe somebody died, there's a judgment, they're in jail, whatever. So we go after a lot of property tax delinquents, we skip trace them, we call them, door knock, and we try to find out what is their problem. And then we solve that. So we do tax delinquents, We love stuff with, we do a lot of creative subdividing. We've gotten really good at that. We're doing quiet titles, adverse possession, variances. We love properties with judgments. We're always looking back because like judgments, you can buy a judgment, you can discount a judgment, you can pay to get released and you can let it expire. And we do everything from driving for dollars. We're doing entitlements now. We utilize grant for zoning. codes, but it's basically anything that's weird or stuff, we look for problems, and then we solve the problems, and then there's typically really big paydays.

I have a little bit of a biased view on this because I've seen some of the fruits of this strategy. You look for problems that it seems like most other people will give up on, right? Yes. Do you feel like that's why the paydays are bigger?

Yes, because a lot of people won't do it. We just did a deal with 38 airs. Okay. And we got 36 of them. That took us about a year. And then we couldn't get the last two heirs because one was a ward of the state and one had a guardian item. So long story is hardly anyone else is going to take this on. We built the family tree, we got all the deeds, then we paid the taxes off and we did a partition sale, which takes it to sale at the courthouse and it sold for $470,000. And we made like 270, 280,000 on that one deal. So that's kind of deals that people aren't going to take on. You know, we have two full-time genealogists on staff that can help us figure out these deals. So there's a lot of these in the tax delinquents, some in the foreclosure. We get a lot of referrals because people look at this and go, wait a minute. You know, all these people died in test day. I don't want to handle it. And we'll take all those big cases and we get big paydays.

Yeah, that's amazing. So basically, I mean, obviously, that's a big deal. 200 plus thousand. Right before we went to record on this, you said you're doing what? 70, 80 deals a year, roughly?

Probably. I should keep up, but probably 80 deals a year. And I really should know, but I think our average deal is probably 50 to 70,000 per deal.

still pretty, pretty large. I mean, you're not doing, yeah, not every deal is a hundred, 200,000, but there's 50 K average.

Yeah. Probably some 20 and 30,000 quick deals. And some of the deals that take longer, you know, um, we have a lot of, quite a few deals in the 200,000 range. She's got one. We're going to make 300,000 and we've got entitlement that will probably net around 700,000.

So tell people what entitlement means, because that's, I think, a new term for a lot of people. Entitlement.

And this is where a lot of investors are going right now. They're basically either buying chunks of land or typically they'll get it under contract with a long closing. And then they'll go through, they'll hire an engineer, and they'll go through all the city. You have to have geotech, you have to get surveys, you've got to figure out how many units. You hire an engineer, they put it together, then you have to go through and get it passed through the city. Once you get the plans passed, you can sell it off to the builders. Most of the builders are not taking land down. they'll pay a good price to get entitled. So this is like the new thing that everybody's running to and the profits are, like we talked about Brandon Maxwell, he just made 2.2 million on one entitlement deal. You know, so this is, and I'll tell you about this deal we're doing real, this was interesting. So there was this one piece of property, it was tax delinquent. I need to stop talking about tax delinquent.

Brandon, if you're Brandon's listening to this and you want that part deleted, let me know.

Yeah. So I'm kidding. So it was, it was, it was a piece of property. It was tax delinquent. We kept calling on them and they finally decided they're ready to sell. So this is cool how we structure it. So we needed 290,000 to close on it. So, I'm like, how are we going to come up with $290,000? I'm always trying to figure out weird stuff. How are we going to come up with $290,000? Our money's invested in all these projects. Where there's another guy in Cyrus with Northway Homes, I won't mention his name, but what happened was we had another piece of property we were selling to him for $50,000. Title issues. And about a year later, we cleared him up and then we listed it for $80,000. He said, no, you're going to sell it to me for $50,000. My partner Stas and him got into a little going back and forth. And I was like, okay, Stas, he wants that property at $50,000. Tell him we'll sell him the property at $50,000. This is another lot somewhere else, but he needs to loan us money to purchase this other piece of property. We're not going to sell it to him. So he agreed. So he loaned us money at 12%. And it accrues for one year into that for no money. Then there's two parcels next door. So I kept calling the people, they never answer. So I kept knocking on the door. And finally, they met with me, bonded, the son was really cool. He was he'd done some real estate, we bonded. And then We came back, and these other two lots were probably worth $350,000, but they played hardball.

We're on the same deal that you had to get the $294,000, right? Yes.

We got that piece, and then these are two pieces that fit in with it, so we get the frontage. We needed it, but we didn't totally. That would be better if I showed you, but basically, I think we got this one piece that's L, and we got these two other pieces that fit into it to make it a square.

But the L was not touching any road frontage?

The L was, it had road frontage, right? But they also had a lot of the road frontage, which we wanted. So what we did with them was really, we agreed to 500,000, which is above value with a year closing. It's a win-win situation. They're getting more than their land's worth. And so we basically put them together and we did a survey where we get 36 units on it. And we got a letter of intent for 45, we didn't get 47. So if that deal works out, it looks good. We'll make about 700,000 and we might have 70 or 80,000 into getting it passed through the city. So it's a real creative way to structure it.

You're creating equity by restructuring the way the parcel sits and the approvals and everything.

Yep. We're creating a lot of equity. That's amazing. And all these entitlements, you can pay people full market value a lot of times. You just need the time and the engineers to do all the studies and figure out how many units you can put on.

Right. Now, that's if the seller understands the potential. I'm sure you go to sellers sometimes that have no idea that you can go through all that. And those are even bigger deals, right?

Yeah. Those are, we just started doing the entitlements. We've got two or three others we're working on right now. Okay. Wow. That's, so this is where a lot of investors are headed. Um, it's not super hard and it's just structuring it correctly with the long closings, or we got sort of lucky on that, getting the financing for two 90. I mean, we could have paid cash. We could have done that, but it just, it would have made our, our, our, our things more tighter, you know,

Well, that strategy too, I've never heard that where you leverage a buyer at a lower price and then say, hey, we'll do it if you lend us the money. That's genius.

Yeah. Well, let me explain that again. So for the 290, we put it under contract, right? Yeah. For a separate parcel. And then we had the other guy. Yeah. We're like, we're argument over what he's going to pay for it back and forth. Then we finally said, yeah, we'll do that. Only if you loan us the money on this.

Right. It gave you another.

So he's like, okay, I get what I want. I'm getting 12% interest on my money. I'm okay. And we sell this guy a lot of land too.

Okay. All right. So you knew him.

Yeah. We have a smart relationship. So we're like, so there's a lot of creative things that, that I think people can do a whole lot more. than they think they can. A lot of people have self-limiting beliefs. You've got to get creative. You've got to bring partners in. You've got to figure out how to structure stuff.

You probably look at a deal in so many different angles that other people don't look at. I would imagine it's very hard for you to say, no, I'm not going after something.

I'm getting better at that because 10% of the deals we got into taking a lot of our time and effort for not a tremendous amount of payday. So I've got to start eliminating those because I'm like, oh, this sounds like fun. Let me do it. Right. So I'm trying to, like, train myself not to go after some of the lower deals, you know. Yeah. Tell you about another deal we're doing to get tax delinquent. a deceased owner with multiple heirs. One of the heirs is in Jamaica as $100,000 judgment. So what we did is we tracked down the family, we made a deal with them to buy one lot for 5,500, the other lot for 5,500. We'll take over the situation. We're going to buy it with bad title, $100,000 judgment. So what we did is we just waited for the judgment to expire. Judgments are good for 10 years.

They can be renewed in North Carolina, right?

North Carolina. Yes. And there's some there's some federal judgments that are 20 years criminal judgments. OK, we knew it was 10 years. It was a hospital. So this is really important. We put it into a land trust. So even if they would have renewed the judgment, it would only renew against him, not the property. So we just waited it out. We waived the $100,000 out. We split the lots into 13 lots. Five are buildable. And we have a contract right now for $350,000 on it. We do have one more title glitch to clear up from 1999. but that deal will net 300,000. So it's, it's, we look for, we look at stuff, we look at how can we subdivide it? Is there any subdividing stuff? What are the problems? And the bigger problems that you can solve, the more money you can make. So that, that will be, be one of our bigger deals. And, um, we, We got one little title glitch from 1999 that we're clearing up. And then, you know, we should make at least $300,000 on that deal. But it was like, we bought it like three or four years ago.

So, well, I was going to ask you, so first of all, that's amazing. And anybody listening that can't even fathom a $300,000 deal, that's, there's one way to do it. Right. So, uh, but it takes time and patience. You bought it. How many years before the 10 year expiration on the judgment?

Uh, had two more years to go.

Okay. So you knew going in and you're like, okay, here's my ticking clock.

Yeah.

And you're pretty certain that thing's gonna, well, like you said, it's either gonna expire and fall off, or if they renew it, it goes against the person and your property's free and clear at that point.

I mean, technically they could have foreclosed, but the lots didn't have a big value. And I'm not saying they won't, I've never seen the hospital foreclose on a property. So we knew we could just wait it out. Now there is some risks there, but we might've had 15,000, 20,000 total invested. The reward outweighs the risk on those type deals.

How do you look at the categories of liens? You talked about medical. Do you have different buckets that you say, oh, yeah, that's easy. I know how to fix that one in order to negotiate that one, or those aren't negotiable, things like that?

Yeah. We have an idea. For example, Ford Motor Credit and Home Depot are dumbasses. They don't pay attention to the property, so we let those expire. You know, the IRS typically doesn't, you know, we buy property, the IRS, like there's one on Strangford we bought, had like 100,000 in IRS judgments. And we just bought it in my partner's Roth IRA. And then we rented it out. We let the judgments expire. We sold it. We made $147,000. A little bit of a risk, but not over, not a huge risk. And that was a foreclosure. They tried to sell it, but no one wanted to buy it with a judgment. I'm like, We know the risk is minimum and we'll take on the risk. So there are some risks. These things don't always go as planned.

So the IRS, I think you've said you have not seen them try to foreclose.

I've not seen them foreclose. I'm sure that it has happened, but typically it doesn't.

But I'm not a lawyer. Yeah. Yeah. You're not making any representations here.

Yeah. No representations.

This is for entertainment purposes only. Yes. Okay, so what about the 20-year, I've never heard that, the 20-year criminal judgment?

Some kind of criminal judgment, federal judgment, I'm not sure, but it lasts 20 years.

Interesting, okay. And then obviously, if you're dealing with deed of, well, actually, I've seen and heard you talk about even deed of trust and mortgages, that you can get those figured out as well.

Yes, we've had old deed of trusts that we've gotten removed from properties before.

Now, are these loans that, you know, there's just no record of them anymore or they're paid off or you just don't know?

Some of them we don't know. And some of them, like, for example, we've done really well with land where the houses were bulldozed by demoed by the city because they're in bad shape. And there's still the mortgage. The mortgage company won't pay the taxes so far. But we were 100 percent successful in getting those removed through Uncle Carl legal actions. Until this one over on Ore Street, and now fighting them. But long story, we'll do a quiet title. We'll eventually get them to get that off. So, I was telling everybody, oh, we're 100% successful. And then all of a sudden, this one where we're having to fight them. But typically, we can get those removed. And we're really good at And I'll tell you about another story. This is another one with Brandon Maxwell. We're gonna make him a sub-star here, okay?

Brandon is gonna be the co-guest on this without even being on.

Yeah, so it's one deal where it's tax delinquent owned by a defunct corporation. Okay. And so it had, taxes are always in first position, right? Property taxes, no matter what, if the property taxes aren't. There was a judgment from HG Supply, Home Depot, And then there's a Ford Motor Credit. So it's important in the order that the judgments are done, right? So taxes are first, and then the Home Depot judgment was clocked next, and then Ford Motor Credit came in. So basically, we told them, hey, look, we negotiate, we'll give you $15,000, and we'll take over all the problems.

This is what you said to the seller.

Yeah. We went back and forth, you know, and they're like, okay, we're just done with this.

How much were the taxes?

Approximately the taxes were 25,000. It's like 73,000 ish for the AC supply and 63 or something ish for the, for the, um, uh, Ford motor credit.

You're in starting out for 40,000 with taxes and seller. Well, we didn't pay the taxes. Okay, I got it. So you just, you got the deed without, which you can do in Mecklenburg County, crazy enough.

Yep. Yeah. So we got the deed and we're in for $18,000 with closing costs. So we had to pay one year. And this is interesting. We got title insurance subject to the taxes and the two judgments. So this- Okay, yeah. But we want to make sure that everything else is- Everything else is good. Okay. So you can do this. Some attorneys will tell you you can't. Right. So we got that. And then we call, we call it HD Supply. And we said, this is Alliance Finance Inc. We buy bad debt. You've got this judgment against the economy waterproofing or whatever it was. And we'd like to buy it for $15,000. And they said, well, can you do $16,000? We're like, okay. But this is what's important.

They went from $15,000 to $16,000? Yeah. They must have taken a Chris Voss course or something.

Well, we just offered them $15,000 and they said, can you do $16,000? We're like, okay. We're not going to argue. But that's great. So this, this judgment was up to 73,000. It was probably like eight years old. So it expired in two years. Okay. So we bought another reason we bought the judgment is because of Ford motor credit is in third position. We didn't want to satisfy it because then Ford motor credit comes in the second position. Right. So then we called up Ford Motor Credit and negotiated that down to 22,000. From 63 to 22? 22. Okay. So we did that.

And then, um, What was that conversation? Same thing? We buy bad debt?

No, no. That was like, we always get authorization to release. So we got authorization to release from the former owner and we faxed it in. So we have a right to talk to you about the property.

And so in that authorization, you're naming the lien holder or no?

Yes. You're naming like, it's like, it's a standard. Whenever you go to sell a property, you get an authorization release, you know, that's right.

Yeah. Yeah. So, but sometimes you see like a generic one and sometimes you say you, you list the mortgage loan or something like that.

It just said for any, any judgment, any debts, so that we fax it in. And then we were able to negotiate that down to 22,000.

Just being, just negotiating on behalf of the debt.

I actually know what happened was I kept calling the lawyer at Smith Deadman. Uh, he was the one that represented them. They weren't, wasn't going really well. So I called him like four times in a row and then he answered the phone, Carl, I'm not going to deal with you. And he said, stop harassing me. And he hung up the phone. So we had to get the old owner. There's weird things that happen. So we called the old owner up and said, Hey, would you like to make extra thousand dollars? So I just need you to make this phone call and negotiate, and we're going to get this debt removed from you. So we had them call up and they negotiated it for us. That's amazing.

And you told them what to say?

Yep. They're going back and forth. We're texting them, you know, and then we sold that property. We made 143,000. That was, that was on industrial way. I got, I got slides. I can show you this, but what I want people to know is, is these problems, a lot of terms. Oh, you got to pay these more. You got to pay this off. You got to do this, whatever, you know, you can get creative on a lot of these deals. And these are problems that people can't solve. And we did take a risk because I mean, either of those companies could have foreclosed, but again, Home Depot, dumb asses, Ford Motor Credit, dumb asses. They didn't even check to see the people on property. They should have just kept their stuff on it because they could have collected, if the property was sold at the tax sale, they would have got paid full. But because they're dumb asses, they didn't even check that.

What about like credit, I see a lot of credit card liens and things like that.

Yep. We'll negotiate those. Okay. So we have a window where we negotiate. We've got certain crazy techniques on how to negotiate those.

And then state, we're dealing with some right now, like 11 or 12,000 in state judgments. I think they're actually criminal. So you cannot negotiate those, right?

We've not been able to negotiate those. They will not negotiate those.

Okay. Do you ever go into the back door? I'm not talking about the back door of a property, but do you ever go into a property through the back door by trying to buy the debt first and then get in? Yes. Okay.

We had one at 3101 Florida in Charlotte. Okay. Okay. And had a first mortgage, a second mortgage, and it had a whole bunch of judgments. So what we did is we called one of the junior judgment holders way off. And I said, hey, look, I know you've got a judgment against this guy. And it looks like you're way back in, in, in, in, in, in the thing. And there's not a lean position, lean position. And can you tell me what happens? Oh, the guy's a son of a bitch. He used my language. He stole money from me, whatever. I said, how would you like to make a little bit of money and get them back? He goes, I'm in. So we used his judgment to foreclose, to get ownership of the property. We made a deal with the first mortgage to take less. We negotiated with the second mortgage for $7,500 to release, and we negotiated all the other judgments. We made $75,000, but it wasn't worth the time and effort. It was more proof of concept for us.

So how would that not be worth the time and effort?

Well, first of all, I had two partners in it, and I did most of the work. Brian just sat back and did nothing.

I didn't hear that name, but it's probably right.

No, he brought us the deal. But anyway, so I did a lot of the work and stuff. It just took a lot of maneuvering. We had to hire an attorney to foreclose. It sounds cool, $75,000, but you split it up and all your time, that was a deal we never should have done. But now we have proof of concept how we can work these type deals.

So just out of curiosity, how did it end up shaking out? You got in, you bought that junior lien, right?

We didn't buy it. We sort of or used it. I don't know how Mike, yeah, used it to foreclose. And then once we got ownership, we were able to still give it back to him so he could still collect. I don't totally understand it, but that's, that's.

Okay. Okay. Got it. So, What about... I've never gone after these, but I've had to deal with some. If we're dealing with a deed of trust that's foreclosing, sometimes there's a secondary... Right on the heels of that is an HOA foreclosure. Do you ever get in the door through an HOA foreclosure because it's so cheap?

We haven't. We've done a couple of those, but we pretty much stay away from those. The only HOA foreclosures we would target would be if there's no mortgage and let's say someone's deceased or there's two heirs fighting or something. Besides that, we don't do a lot of that.

Okay. Yeah. I always wonder. I always wonder if that, if there's, I, first of all, I hate HOAs. So it's not like I'd rather have property that doesn't have HOAs, but I've always wondered, cause you can see some of these, they go to foreclosure after two, three, $4,000. It's tiny, tiny amounts. Uh, obviously, you know, you don't know what the first is until you look at it, but.

Yeah. And, and, and, and my old partner, Mitch, what I talked about, he would buy those. And sometimes, uh, every now and then you find out that they're still paying the mortgage. So he owned the property, and then he'd be able to take over the board. So there's ways to do that too. We just have so many other ways that we stay away from that. Again, we love the heirs and the partial interest stuff.

Yeah. I know. If you have the patience for it, I mean, how long does your typical deal take to close and actually get paid?

I'd say one year, starting to payday. Some of them can be three to six months. We've got some deals going on five years right now. But like I said, the average messy deal is probably somewhere between six months to a year is what it takes us.

All right. So three months is a really quick deal for you on the messy stuff. Do you do anything clean though?

We do. We buy some lots that we can split, bigger lots that we wholesale. Okay. Oh, I'll tell you about a lot deal that we just did. It was interesting. We found this lot. It was is a lot that we could subdivide and had another lot. And we put it under contract for 50,000. Okay. And this is a relatively clean deal. So we saw that we know that we get three lots out of it. Most people, because there's a post construction buffer, didn't think that you could subdivide this other one. So long story is the guy put it under contract for $50,000. then he had a little IRS problem. We tried to work it out. He didn't come to closing. So we filed, we did everything. We always try to work with people. Okay. Wouldn't come to closing. So we filed a Liz pendants. That's a lawsuit for specific, specific performance. Basically saying we did everything. We gave you your due diligence. We're willing, ready, willing, able to close. So he went to sell that to somebody else and they stopped the closing when they found it at Liz pendants. So we don't like to sue people, but in this circumstance, we did everything in our agreement, he didn't. So the court finally went through and granted us the right to buy it at 50,000. We actually agreed to pay him an extra 10,000, but this one we have sold off for 215,000. So this is basically a simple deal. It would have been a simple deal, but even kind of closing, it's a lot split and we'll make about 160 on that deal.

Just to kind of zoom out on the deal again, so you've got one parcel, how much acreage is this one parcel?

One parcel 100 foot of frontage. Okay. Okay. And it looks like it's just, you know, but we know we can subdivide it sort of against the zoning. Um, won't tell you how we'll do that, but we know we can divide against the zoning. The other part is like close to like a little stream as opposed to construction buffer. So, you know, he's like, Oh, this is just a regular lot. Well, we knew that we could get three lots out of it.

Okay. So you were turning one lot into three paydays?

Yeah. Well, it was one lot with a hundred, then another lot. And so, yeah, we're turning into three lots.

Okay. And then, okay. Amazing. So yeah, if, if it hadn't been for the specific performance issues and less pendants, you would have had a very clean. Did you want to get that done? Is it, is it all behind you now?

No, we still, I think he's refusing to come to closing again, but we'll, we'll get through, but that's, you know, What are some of the clean, we don't do a lot of clean, easy stuff, but we do some creative land subdividing and things like that. But majority of our stuff takes a while and you have to put your own money in it because no one loans against bad title, you know, and then we clean up the title.

So that means you're bringing in equity partners a lot of times, right?

We use our own cash now. A lot of our own cash. And then we do bring in equity partners sometimes and we borrow money. We'll borrow money against some of our stuff that's clear title to use that. And we have some investors that understand what we do. And we pay them really good interest.

Okay. Amazing. All right. And we'll get at the end of this. We'll, we'll make sure people know how to contact you for either bringing you deals and or bringing you money.

704-777-7777. Um, that's our number and I'll give you my, we'll put in my other, my direct number too.

Okay. Amazing. Amazing. You want to talk about that? Cause that's a kind of a cool story, how you got the number.

Yeah, so I went to this course guy named John Ulmer. Now he ended up going to jail. He's a real estate guy, but he did a little bit of fraud. And so, but anyways, this course, he, he, he said, uh, and this is like 20 something years ago. So you need to have an easy to remember number. Right. So I just, now I used to drink very heavily. So one night at 10 o'clock, I dial a 704-7777. I said, hello? And the guy goes, yeah. Hey, I'd like to buy your phone number. And the guy's like, dude, you sound drunk. And I says, I am, but I do real estate and I'd really like to buy your number. Okay. He sold it to me for 450 bucks. That's it? Oh my God. Now, the reason he sold it to me is, 777, 777 in a lot of areas is taxi cabs. He gets calls for taxis all the damn time. He gets all sorts of weird stuff. So it's annoying to have that number. So that's the reason he sold me for 450 bucks. I just had an attorney offer me 110,000 for the phone number the other day.

Was it a personal injury attorney? Yep. Yep. So he wants the billboard and- He wants the billboard of that number, so. So how did the guy, I mean, not that we have to get too much in the weeds on the number, but how, how did the guy or why did the guy with the 777 number originally get it?

Oh, he worked at cricket and they were going to the numbers. He thought it was cool. So he bought it himself. Did he do anything with it? He used it as his personal number for a while. And then he got so annoyed with it, you know, happened to be the right one at the right time. And, um, $450 and it's worth over a hundred now.

Yeah.

Yeah. I probably could get 140, 150,000 from this one attorney.

Do you know, do you get, I mean, obviously I see you put it out just in our community and stuff. Do you get deals through that number?

Uh, some. Yep. Okay. Okay. But if you call it, it says press one, if you, for real estate or something, because it just inundated with calls.

And then do you have press two for taxi and then just hang up?

No, I should do something like that.

Um, okay. So I think I would, I would be remiss in not asking you, uh, about the uncle Carl's goat farm. I mean, you can't have an interview with uncle Carl without talking about the goat farm. So anybody that's known Carl or seen him at, at meetups or any events or anything like that has probably seen your goat farm shirts. But for those who are, Uh, not yet lucky enough to have seen them. Do you want to explain the firm story?

Well, well most good stories and this is true story start off.

I was drinking at a bar Okay, and for the record you don't drink anymore, right?

Oh five august will be five years sobriety. I I Very impressive did I? did too much of it. So now I can't enjoy it anymore. There you go. Okay. So I'm drinking at the bar and the bartender tells me that his mama's going into foreclosure. I'm like, he goes, and then I said, well, you know, we, we buy houses. His name was Warren. He owns Midwood Country Club anyway. So he's sitting there. Oh shit. You might've bleeped that out. Anyway, so I was sitting... His name was Mike. Mike. His name was... Okay. Anyway, so I'm sitting there and he says, mom was going into foreclosure. So I'm like, hey, I'll buy it. So I went down and met her. We hit it off. We made a deal. And this is really interesting. So picture this. It is actually sort of like in a triangle. This piece is like a triangle and it's zoned agriculture. On two sides, it's Tiga Cay. This is a rich, airy, expensive area. But this piece was two sides bordered by Tiga Cay. So I called up the city manager because I want them to annex. If they annex to the city, it's worth a lot more and I can build more units on it.

So just pause for one second. People may or may not know what annex means. So can you just... Annex is basically the city...

Incorporates into the city.

So it was TGK, or I'm sorry, it was in what? TGK. And then it would have been annexed into? TGK. Okay. Got it. Yeah, because it's in the county. It was in the county and not in the town. Okay.

Yeah. So I'm like, Hey, they want to, so I called, I called up the guy and went down and I'll never remember. He put his hand on my shoulder. City manager said, son, we're not going to annex that in to the city. I'm like, okay. Why? He said, well, we're building a baseball field behind there. We sort of like to buy it, but we really don't need it. I'm like, okay, well, what do you pay me for? He said, well, we'll pay you about 85,000. I'm like, that's a little bit low. Let me go talk to my partner. So I went back and then I called him up and said, let's negotiate on this price. And he said, yeah, we need to be at 65,000. I'm like, what? He said, we need to be at 65,000. I'm like, Okay, let me get this. So you're not going to annex it, right? He goes, right. And it's in the county, right? Zone agriculture goes correct. And I said, I can open a freaking goat farm on there. And he's like, well, I guess you could. So what we did then, we got this big banner, Uncle Carl's Goat Farm. We rented goats. We even have cupcakes with goats made on them. We had a little key to the city. We had, so we put on this big production about, and we had the t-shirts, Uncle Carl's Goat Farm coming to TGK. So goats are running around and waving at all these neighbors. Of course, this is a rich area. And they're like, they see this goat farm coming to TGK. So we just put on this whole, we did Facebook Live about how this goat farm's coming. Got some of the neighbors to come by and stuff like that. How many goats did you rent? We only rented three, but that was enough. That was enough. We put them out by the road and running around.

What's the price per day for a goat?

Well, I think we paid $300 for like three hours. That's worth it.

Okay. Good investment. Yeah. I guess we'll talk about that. Go ahead.

So we took the goats, they're running around and we have the goat shirts and some of the neighbors come by. We get a call the next day. Yeah, we can pay you a hundred thousand and we can close in seven days. Okay. So I guess they didn't want a goat farm in their city. So the moral of the story is be fair with uncle Carl. They'll be fair with you, but try to mess with them. He's going to open a goat farm and you're going to have to deal with goats.

Or some other variation of a goat farm strategy, right? Yes. So the call back saying we'll pay a hundred was from the same guy that told you 85 and 65?

Oh yeah, he told me 85, and then he went down to 65.

Okay. He's the city manager. Yeah. Do you know for sure? Did a neighbor call or something like that? What happened?

I suspect that happened. I can't say 100% sure, but if the next day, all of a sudden it's 100,000 closed in seven days, I think they probably got a call or two.

That's hilarious. That's one of the greatest stories.

And we also sent them, I think, a letter before that saying that we are going to be training ninja attack goats and we're a little concerned the fences may not hold. So I think they're like, this guy's crazy. We just need to go ahead and buy this thing. Oh my God.

You sent the letter to the city?

City about the ninja attack goats. Yeah, that's hilarious. I'm sure they were just like they I think I was messing with them, but I think they're like, who is this guy?

Yeah. Did you at least put any pictures of like, creations of what the ninja attack goats were going to look like?

Oh, just a simple letter.

I guess this is before AI really took off, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Amazing. All right. So if anybody out there wants to figure out how to annex land in from a really tough negotiator at the city, there you go. That's how you do it. That's amazing. So I think it's probably hard for people to fathom the types of deals you look at probably make people's brains explode, right?

Yes. And they're not as hard as people think. We have a lot of people and you learn the intestate laws. And, you know, I mean, think about, I tell people, you can get a degree in electrical engineering. This is much easier.

You know, it's like, are you getting it?

It's not. That's a good point. Yeah. Yeah. People think, oh my, but it, I hate to say it, but it's not super hard. I should be telling everybody it's too hard. You can't do it. Call me for all your, all your deals, but they can still do that, right? Yeah. Oh, please call me. Cause we'll join venture. We'll work with people on these kinds of deals. So.

Yeah. We're, we're working together on something where maybe we'll turn it into a goat farm. Who knows? Right. That's a possibility. It's not as nice as TK, but, uh, so, um, all right. So that's kind of your, your day to day. I mean, you've got, what does your week look like? I mean, are you just looking for adventure?

Well, yeah, we have a lot of virtual assistants that are pulling all sorts of different data points and we're stacking data and then, um, We're looking for sure, I won't go into totally what we look for. We're able to identify certain stuff and then we start calling, sometimes we'll doorknock. And then I'm looking at deals all the time where the staff like, there might be a deal, we'll build a tree and there's all these heirs and we'll figure out how to buy the first ones out and try to work through the whole deal. It's a lot of looking at deals on the phones with attorneys and trying to just figure out ways to get these deals done.

I've heard you say it before. You don't have to be the smartest investor out there. You just rely on really sharp experts like attorneys and others that have been through it.

That is helpful, but you do have to be able to figure ways to talk to the people, show them what's going on and solve their problems. So there's also a lot of private investigation that goes on. So a lot we do, and I'll tell you about this other deal we did on Laburnum. And this is where a lot of our deals, there's private investigation. You're like private investigator trying to figure out what's going on. We knew this guy, one guy, he died. So it was like a vacant house, tax delinquent, deceased owner, and there's squatters living in there. So basically what we did is we checked to see if there's a state first. There's no state file. So we died in test state. So you go by the test state laws. Oh, he had no children. He had one brother, so it would have gone to his brother. Again, you've got to learn the testate laws.

Yeah, for each state, right? Each state's got its own set of laws. Each state's a little bit different.

They're all similar, but they're different. So it would have gone to his brother, but we're investigating his brother died in a plane crash in Crete in 1973. So it would have gone to his two sons, Jack and Louis Anders, right? So we start looking for these kids and we can't find them anywhere. So we're like, huh, this is a house that's in a great area. There's squatters living in it. Now it's become taxed land. So we're like, why can't we find these kids? So one of the things I did is I went to the funeral home where they'd done Jack's funeral services. And I walked in and I said, hey, I need to see the guest book. I'm Carl Spill, the Lions Finance. I need to see the guest book for da, da, da, da, da. I acted like I owned the place. I went in like that. Did they just give it to you? They just give it to me. So I opened the guest book and I copied down everybody's name, skip trace every single person, call them. And one of the ladies told us that the mom of the two boys got remarried to a police officer outside of D.C. OK, so we started looking through newspapers dot com and other sources. And then we see Hoffman marries Anders. Right. OK. Happened was when the mom got remarried, she changed the kids names. Wow. That's why you have to be a private investigator. And we made two hundred forty three thousand on that because there was so much other problems we had to solve. But this is Part of what people don't understand is you have to be a private investigator too. You've got to go through and figure out the pieces of the puzzle. And there's just many a times where it's, it's been searching. And I'll tell you a quick, a quick other one. There's another deal. It's a lot that we knew we could subdivide into two. And the lady's name was, um, Marva Frazier. Right. So we're skipping Marva Frazier, calling her everywhere. And we called this lady in Texas. She goes, I wish you people stopped calling me. Cause other people were trying to get the deal. So we're like, I'm just, I'm not the right one. So we're like, okay, how do we find this lady?

Right. Okay. So this Marva in Texas said, no, it's not me.

It's not me. This deal could be subdivided. So we went back and we skip traced every single place Marva Frazier lived. We called every single landlord. One of the landlords said, hey, her name is Marvelot. What's the deal with women? They get married, get divorced, change their names. I won't go and say what I usually say. So she changed her name. So then we go on her Facebook page. Okay, we're looking down her Facebook page. And we notice she's talking to a Dorcas Rouse. We skip trace Dorcas. That's her sister. She had died nine months ago. and they didn't know that she had property in North Carolina. It's getting ready to go to foreclosure. So we're able to pay the taxes, get the deed without title insurance, and then clear the title up. And that deal was a really big, big deal because we were able to sell the lot. But that's, it's that, and I probably shouldn't tell people, but that's the investigation that you have to do.

Right. You're basically turning over every possible stone is what it's sounding like. Yes. Where yeah, you never know what what's going to be hiding under one of the stones.

So you got to turn them all over Yep, you got to be a prime investigator. You've got to be able to look at skip tracing programs You've got to be able to intuit stuff And and solve these problems, you know, yeah We've been to jail many a times to get deeds. You've been to jail too, haven't you?

Well, it's funny. I've done some deals from jail and prison, but the most recent one was over the phone with the notary and the inmate in state prison. And so I just was on the phone walking him through the documents. It was interesting. Nice guy. He just happened to be really violent towards people that he was married to.

We got a deal from a murderer and a rapist. That was a rough dealing with that guy.

I've had somebody I'm working with right now on a deal. I won't say names, but he was on the phone this week with someone who He found out after the phone call, the guy went off and I'm on the phone and he found out he's a murderer and he was, he was in, um, I guess he was in prison for murder. And I think, I don't know how long he's been out, but do you ever worry that people are going to come after you?

Yeah. Yep. Um, we had this one deal that we're going after, I kept knocking on the door. And I couldn't find this, this lady would never respond. So at the time I was training this girl, I'll just say her name is Emily. Okay, to her last name is Krauss. So I'll say that. So anyways, we're going after this deal. And I couldn't find the lady wouldn't get in contact me. So I I found her son. And he worked at this restaurant called Bupa De, some kind of. So, we went there trying to find him. So, I went there to eat, to find him. So, they sat, they had this one table in the kitchen there, right? They do the tour through the kitchen. I said, hey, come to the kitchen. So, we sat in the kitchen, we're looking, his name was Jeremy. And then we finally heard somebody say, hey, one of the cooks said, Jeremy, hurry up with the mussels. Like, oh, we found this guy. So we went to talk to Jeremy. And I said, Jeremy, we can't get a hold of your mom. Can you give her this message? Give me a call. He goes, oh, sure, sure. I explain the situation. While I was out drinking at a bar, and I see all these missed calls. So eventually, I called back, and it was the mom. She says, don't you ever stalk my kid. I'm part of the Hell's Angels. Where are you? We're going to come kill you dead. Not just kill us, kill us dead.

Make sure you're dead, not just a regular murder.

Not a regular murder. And I'm like, ma'am, I'm so sorry. She's like, seriously, where are you? We're going to come get you. So I laid low for a while. Now, this girl, Emily Krause, OK, I know I should say her name, but she ended up somehow getting her to sign. And our attorney, Harry Marsh, bought the deal from her. And I was sort of pissed. But I'm glad Harry got the deal because she would have sold it to somebody else.

But I was not happy that she... Oh, the other player, I don't know if it's a fictitious name or not, that was not somebody on your team.

Emily Krauss was on our team. OK. And so she was the one that we were training. OK. But she went around us, got it. And in my opinion, she's a scumbag. But that's just my opinion.

Is that a fake name? Just so everybody can know that's a real name.

You can look it up. No, I don't mind. She went around us. She's supposed to be working with us somehow. She befriended the lady. OK. She took it to our attorney. Then her attorney ends up buying the deal. So I was hot as hell. But at least our attorney, Harry Marsh got the deal and he has to deal with the IRS judgment. He'll make a lot of money on that deal.

Once it expires.

Okay. Yeah. I'm glad he got it. Um, but not real happy with Ms. Emily Krauss.

Gotcha. Okay. All right. Well, Hey, don't, don't, don't, uh, double cross Carl, right?

Well, she ended up buying a Mustang and then she got an accident and totaled it. So maybe there's a little bit of karma there. You know, I'm training people and supposed to be working with, get a percentage and they go around me. So I, you know, and that was stupid because she could have stayed for a lot longer, learned a lot more stuff and then gone around me, you know, she just had a little bit of the stuff and I got another guy right now. that I shouldn't say this, and I'm not bitter, but another guy I trained, and you know him, and I trained this guy, showed him what to do, set him up with my attorneys, everything. And he went around me and got some stuff on a deal, and I'm just not going to mention Danny.

So it, but look, it's, it's, it's, you know, half joking, half not, but in all seriousness, there's people that, uh, and I go through these thoughts all the time. It's like, okay, everyone says, yeah, you got to have an abundance mindset. I get that. But the, but the reality is, okay, you spend a lot of time, especially deals you're working on for six, eight, 12 months. That can be tough if, if somebody else is going after it. And I mean, do you, how do you, how do you manage your abundance mindset with caution?

It's hard. Or maybe you can't. No, I do. Overall, I'm like, because I share a lot of people, I help a lot of people. And I that's a good question. I still try to not dwell on these things. Right. And just think that most people are good. And we can work together. And and then some people just They're all about the money. I don't know. That's a good question. It gets a little bit tough sometimes when things like that happen to you, you know?

Yeah. One topic I wanted to, are you okay on time for a little bit? And then we can wrap it up in just a bit. But one kind of key factor it sounds like is there's gotta be value in the deal. Like you're not going after $10,000 pieces of land.

No. We have huge overhead, so we've got to be able to make really good money with all the researchers, everything. We try to make sure the deal is pretty hefty for us to go after.

I'm trying to think of other things. There's so many different variables and angles that you're looking at. It's eye-opening just to hear how you think. Yeah. Well, thanks. And yeah, no, it's, I appreciate it. I mean, you've helped me a ton with, you know, my own deals and, and look, I'm, I'm sure you probably wish I, I would have partnered on more stuff, but I'm, I'm glad we'll at least to be able to.

Hey, why don't you have a little more abundance mindset and bring uncle Carl in on some of these. How about that? I mean, do you have abundance mindset?

I do. I can be a little bit limited in my thinking sometimes, but at some point in time, it makes sense like, okay, let's pay it back. Instead of paying it forward, it's like paying it back. You've helped me get some great deals. And I mean, there's no secret there. So thank you for everything you've done for me.

There's a lot of people that I've shown, like when we were at that mastermind together, Marcella came up to me and said, Hey, I was able to do this variant stuff and I made 60 grand. I love when I can show people how to do something, they make money. I really, You know, unless they're trying to steal the deal from me, I really like that. So I really enjoy being able to give to people.

That's awesome. Yeah, it's it's very cool. With regard to, I guess, just how you operate and kind of thinking forward, are you Are you looking at just continue to feed the machine, do the deals you're doing? Are you taking into account some of the economic conditions saying, okay, I'm going to do things differently because I don't know what's going to happen? How do you look at the market in the context of your deal flow?

I'm not overly worried about it because we're taking on these problems and we're making a lot of money. on per deal, so even if the market was to go down, there'd still be a pretty good margins. And one thing I wanted to add too, is like, we help a lot of people on these air deals and these stuff, we're taking on problems. And I wanna tell you about another deal real quick. And some people think, well, Carl, not hear this, are you taking advantage of people? And this is what we do when there's air situation. This is property at 2122 Ablewood, okay? I called the heirs up and I said, look, you guys are heirs of the property. It looks like it's going to go to tax sale. You know what's going on? He said, well, our sister lives there. She's really difficult. I said, look, I can pay you a lot more money. And I want to pay you a lot more money. Can you get your sister on board? I said, I'm not even going to talk to you for two weeks. I want you guys to make more money because I would rather people have less problems and pay them more. They said, well, our sister says she's never going to sell and she's going to go down with the ship. OK. So I said, well, you know, I went through some of the options, what they could do. They could pay the taxes. They do partition sale. I gave them some options and I said, or we can buy you out. So they sold out to me. So this for them, it would probably would have gone through the tax sale. It was a whole bunch of errors and there were some judges and problems, so they probably wouldn't have seen any money. So I was a great solution for them. So what I want people to know, too, is that we help a lot of people out. And there's times where we are talking to them about deals where we'll actually solve the problem and they can stay in the house. So our first goal, whenever we're going after property, is we want to see if it makes sense for them to stay in the house. If it makes sense, we want to give them options and they can choose whatever is best for them. but a lot of people can't deal with multiple heirs, judgments, people fighting, and they would rather sell their portions for inexpensive just to be done with it. And that's where, you know, that's where, and I just want to talk a little bit more about this deal. So I gave him a couple options and they all took the buyout for 4,400 per share. So we ended up with 90%. We really worked with a sister. They were like, Hey, what can we do to buy you out? What can we do? Just let's talk, let's make something happen. and she wouldn't do anything. So it ended up getting sold at the tax sale and we're able to get the overages on the percentage we have. But there's risks too. We had to run judgments on everybody. We have to show, build the trees. We have to prove where everyone is and stuff like that. But again, what people know is we're not just stealing homes from people. We're not doing that. We're solving these massive problems. We like to give them options and then say, these are some of your options that we know of. you make the choice, you do what's best for you. So I think that's important.

It's very important. Thank you for saying that because a lot of people who don't necessarily know the ins and outs of the deals that you're handling, they may look at it from a bird's eye view and say, oh yeah, you're still in equity. You're doing this and that. And I've heard you talk about a number of deals where you're giving a partnership interest to someone and paying them out when you get paid. We've done that with one lady.

It was a single lady that she was ready to... In a lot of these situations, people are ready to give up or they've given up. And she'd given up on this house, Long story, there's a defunct corporation and a whole bunch of mess. And she just wanted to walk away. She had an abusive husband. She didn't want to have anything to do with it. So we did buy the house for $28,000. And they said, we're going to bring you as a partner, an equity partner, too. She said, OK, we'll give you 18% of whatever the profits are. Now, again, there's a lot of messy title stuff. She's ready to walk away. She didn't want anything to do with it. It's a long story. So we ended up bringing her for 18% of the profits. After we fixed it up, we called her up and said, hey, we got your profit check. And it's $36,800. She goes, stop lying. I said, no, really, it's that. She goes, I don't believe you. I said, come pick it up. And she's like, You're lying. I'm like, no, really. So she's able to get that money. Her kids are going to school. She's able to get them cars and get them to school. So I like... That's awesome. And we didn't have to bring her in as a partner. Yeah. But we're like, you're giving us a good deal. We can solve this, but we want you to be a part of it.

That's very cool. Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. And I'm sure she appreciated it. It sounds like a lot more than she even dreamed it would be.

Yeah. I mean, she was thinking three or four thousand, you know, right.

That's cool. That's very cool. Two other quick points on. Well, you just touched on something because you're like, people mentally check out. And when you're dealing with a seller, I try to do the same thing. I try to sniff out, are they wanting to get rid of it? Or are they like, no, I want to get full market value. What is the indicator for you? And is it just a feel in a conversation? How do you tell whether or not they're checked out?

Uh, pretty much trying to talk to them about some of the options, like just diving into it's hard. Just trying to get on the phone and talk to them and see what's going on. Okay. Hey, I'm just curious. How did you get into this situation to talk about some options? And then we just try to open dialogue. Um, I don't know, explain it. It's just having conversations with people trying to get them to open up. Um, but it's hard because a lot of these people, you know, don't bother me. I'm tired of this. So we have to make multiple calls, multiple texts saying you have options and different stuff.

So, and you can tell if they're exhausted, right? Like they, they're just stressed out about it.

Yeah. And, um, yeah, it's really just trying to discover the issue, the problem, what's going on. And then even again, there's there's a I'll tell you this, there's one other lady kept calling. She kept hanging up on us. Right. Leave me alone. Leave me alone. So Belinda, who works for us, she kept saying, I'm so sorry. I didn't you know, I just I apologize. And she kept texting her back. She says, look, you know, there's some options for you. So she finally called her back. What are my options? She said, well, you know, we could possibly get you money for that. We went through different options and she only owed like $18,000. So we hooked her up with a lender that loaned her money to finish fixing up her house. And then we put her with a credit, someone's credit repair to help getting it or credit fixed so that she can, once the house is fixed up, she can refinance it out. That's cool. So, you know, That was somebody who didn't want to be bothered, but we kept bothering them and we also. We have this relentless text where we send to people that basically says, hey, look, the reason we're doing this is, is, is, is there's options here. We can help you out, you know, and we got some texts from other people we've helped out. So they, you know, try to break through. So the whole thing is trying to break the ice, break through so you can talk to them, just sort of feel what their situation is. And again, we are, our first thing is how, what, what we can do that's best for this person.

Yup. Yup. And it's obviously there's an art to the conversation. It sounds like, which you've, you've become a master at.

Yeah. And we still mess up a lot of conversations too.

Yeah, I know. I understand. Um, the other thing I wanted to ask is on just marketing channels, because, so you have an identified list. Are you then, I always say I do whatever I can do to get in touch with somebody like you, you mentioned door knock, call, text. Are you, are you mailing people too? Like what are the others?

We should, we should be mailing, but we're not. Um, We need to get our mailing campaign because people react to different stuff. We've gotten two or three really killer deals over the years from emails. It doesn't work very often, but you've got to hit them in different channels. Some people respond to text, some people in person, some people phone calls, some people mail. And we've done some handwritten letters that have broken through, but you've got to try to hit them in different ways. And then a lot of times you've got to do a little, if it's really big, you've got to research them to see what you can find out about them. Like, for example, let's say, I think I was doing this one person and they were a big Donald Trump fan. So I knew to be careful not to say anything negative about that. POS. So, you know, you got it.

Yeah. And you, well, you're looking at someone's Facebook page, you're, you're figuring out all these different things about them and what they are into. Yeah. Um, you know, it's funny, the mail thing. I also have done very limited amounts of mail, but I know that it works. Um, and I don't know if you've seen this, but you know, Google, So a lot of neighborhoods in charlotte have spectrum for internet and everything a lot of these neighborhoods are getting google fiber and have you seen this yeah. So Google Fiber, it is amazing the marketing they're doing. I'm like, God, if I could just replicate what they're doing, they, they will drop mailers pretty much every week. They will send someone to your knock on your door. They'll send you emails, all the like omni-channel marketing from Google Fiber. I'm like, God, I just need to do everything Google Fiber is doing, but it costs a lot of money. Yeah. And, um, and it takes a lot of consistency.

If the deals are worth it. I mean, we're stupid by, we haven't been door knocking as much lately. I'm in the door knocker and I can't get out to do it, but we need to do more door knocking. We need to do more mail and set up automated email and stuff like that. But I mean, we're still getting really big, big deals.

And so the whole marketing machine is outbound. You're just, you're outbound.

Most of it, but we get referrals. Like the other day, this guy named Avi called me up and he had this deal. And so we partnered on it. So, so, so part of it is referrals. So guys, you have any deals. I'm gonna give you my direct phone number. There we go. Yeah, please. And make sure you post it really big. 704-995-5385. It's best to text me directly. The 777 number goes to our staff, our great team. But text me directly and try to bring me some good deals because I love being able to figure out these things.

All right. 704-995-5385. And so if someone's got a deal, call or text that number. Don't do the 777 number.

Yeah. Text me. And then when you do, the more information you have, the better, like, are the people deceased? What's going on? I want people to try to have the numbers and everything ready for me so that I can look at it and dissect it.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think I'll say this. I said this when I was talking to Travis Howard, one of our mutual friends the other day, you're not going to go around anybody. So if somebody calls you and says, Hey, I don't even have an under contract. You need the address, right? Like people sometimes are nervous to share that if they're new to the business, Carl is not going to go around anybody.

I would rather develop long-term relationships with people and do deals over and over again, like one deal that I can make 50 or 60. And that's a lot of money. It's not worth it. I want to be able to do deal after deal after deal.

Amazing. Are there any other asset classes? Are you just single family houses and land or anything else you're going after like a bigger deal?

Mainly single family houses, mostly land, because land is so hot here. And then we're going to start doing more of the entitlements and assemblages. And then we're getting ready to do some rezonings. And so we want to try to do more of that stuff. But that typically takes about a year. But what else are we doing?

Like, do you go after commercial? No, I don't know.

We don't go after any commercial stuff or multifamily or anything like that.

Any particular reason why or?

Just haven't gotten into it. We like problems, and there's not as much problems in that. But if there's a problem, we'll get involved. But I'm not good at normal things. You know, normal deals. We just haven't gotten into that. We like sort of where we're at. But another thing, too, I'll say. If anybody's been able to make, you know, stay awake through our not 20 minutes, but anyways of stuff, but here's another thing I was going to say, man, my ADD medicine, something that you were going to go ahead. Oh yeah. If anybody has any great nuggets, please share them with, with, with me and you, we like light. If you've got something really cool you've learned, please say, hey, call up and share it with us. And then we'll also share some stuff that we don't always talk about, too. So that's a lot of how I learned these nuanced, these different things is from people telling me. And a lot of it's investigation, but we share people showing me stuff, and then taking one cool thing to be able to run with. So if anybody's got some great nuggets or great, really cool stuff, I'll share with some of the stuff, some other stuff we're doing that I'm not making public.

You know, that's awesome. Yeah. And that's a, that's a great point. It's every single deal you're learning something new. Right. And it's the, well, that's part of the reason why I'm doing this specific podcast, um, to learn from other people like you, like others that we're talking to that have gone through the gauntlet and seen all kinds of different things. And sometimes you don't realize how valuable your own experiences are. So yeah, if you can reach out to Carl and tell him what you learned and, uh, obviously I'd be, I'd love to know as well. Yeah. Anything you learn. Yeah. You really see the power of a tight network of investors that help each other out because... Yes. Yeah. Obviously, we're going after deals sometimes that are similar in nature. But if we help each other out, there's enough deals out there in every market, especially Charlotte, for everybody to win.

Yeah. Yeah. But don't go after the kind of deals I do. It doesn't work here.

Yeah, there's no profit in them.

No profit in the deals at McElroy County. And we can do deals all over the country too. So if you got a deal where someone is deceased, or there's a messy time, we're really good at clearing weird title issues now. We've gotten really good at quiet titles, color title, adverse possession, all sorts of stuff like that. So if you got anything messy or whatever, as long as there's a good profit in it, call Uncle Carl, 704-995-5385. There we go.

We'll make it big. Anything else you want to share before we drop? I know we've been on for a while.

I mean, just like we get some stuff driving for dollars and then we deep dive on those. A lot of our stuff is looking for value adds, legal loopholes, zoning loopholes. A lot of ways that we've been successful. Now, we have some issues, too, but we're being successful is when we've been stopped. We're saying you can't do this because of this. Right. There's a book called The Obstacle is the Way. It's a great book. I think it's Ryan Holiday. But those are opportunities. Like, for example, I'll tell you about this this one deal. We bought half interest in the house one time. Right. We're trying to buy the other half, and it's getting ready to go to foreclosure. And we kept trying everything we could do to get the guidance. We even offered him over what the house was worth for his half. He wouldn't do anything. So we're like, oh, we lost this deal. Well, we were at a meetup one time and an attorney I won't say his name, but this attorney Cam Scott was there and I ran into him and I was talking about the deal and he said, well, you can do excess proceeds. I'm like, what the hell is that? There's an overage and there's a fair, you know, there's a fair amount of work to it and stuff, but I can get you half of the overage on the sale so that we have a whole wing now of excess proceeds. And that came from a failed deal or an obstacle. The same thing with judgments. you know, first attorney said, oh, you have to pay all these judgments off. We're like, why? Yeah, you can't get title, you just gotta pay them off. And then we started investigating, talking to other attorneys that you can buy the judgment, you can discount it, you can pay to get it released, you can wait till it expired. So now, because of hitting a roadblock in something, now we have a whole wing working through judgments. So I'm trying to look, we've got, oh, here's another one. Like we've got this lot that was too small to build on. So we're like, oh, what can we do? So we asked a lot of investors, you know, like, what can we do? And one of them said, well, you can do a variance. We're like, what the hell is a variance? And we learned about it. And now we have a wing where we do variances. But a lot of the stuff is get involved, find the problems. And when people tell you you can't do it, there's usually a way. But again, the obstacle is the way.

I need to read that book. I've heard people talk about it. And it sounds like that book is I mean, pretty good content on exactly that topic.

It's really good. Being ADD and stuff, I have a therapist now to deal with. It's a lot of issues and problems. And being ADD, there's some really great stuff. And then there's some major problems with organization stuff. And that's one of the books that we're talking about. It's such a good way to open up to see that the problems, the issues or whatever, when you get stopped, that can be the way to make money. That can be the way things get done. And I think that's really important in the mindset of people. I always tell people, stop being stopped. You know, you'll get stopped and they'll tell you, you can't do this or whatever. And there's usually ways still to monetize a deal or at the very least, learn something from that that you can utilize. And another thing, just by getting in, learning, networking other investors, you're going to have your eyes open for opportunities, because there's people that have a fixed mindset. And then what the other one is, and if you're just like, oh, I can't do this because of this, this, you have all these self limits, you've got to just open the radar up to spot opportunities, because there's almost infinite opportunities on making money and stuff. Just by working in the stuff, networking, you're going to find those. And just have that kind of don't have those self-limiting beliefs. I can't do this. I don't have any money. I can't do this because of this. You know, I don't have credit. Just those are all excuses. Stop having excuses. There's another book by Ryan Tracy called No Excuses. OK, and it just you can choose to have an excuse for everything or you can get it done. And having that mindset is so important. Do I get caught up in a lot of stuff? Yes. Do I get caught up in negative? So I'm still working, too. But just know that stop having self-limiting beliefs. I want everyone here to know that you can do this. And the only reason stopping you is self-limiting beliefs. That will stop you.

Absolutely. Um, anyone listening to this, uh, I hope that there's a number of people that, that have, so I know how people think a little bit, right. Cause I I've also thought this way. People may not want to bring you a deal. Cause you're like, well, I don't want to give up any equity. Please. I'm encouraging you what Carl just shared. will make you significant amounts of money on deals, and he will help you a lot faster than if you try to figure it out on your own. I should have partnered with you on stuff a long time ago. Yeah, you should have. So let's just encourage people. I'll say, you've been tremendously generous to me and to many, many people. You just talked about a number of people that have made tremendous amounts of money because of the knowledge that you've shared with them. So if anyone was thinking,

Yeah, Joshua Swartz said he made over a million dollars from the mastermind on things that we taught. And I'm happy. I'm happy. And it makes me feel really good. But Josh still hasn't wrote me a check yet. So maybe he will.

Oh, there you go.

All right, Josh. Josh helped me in a lot of ways, too. I'm sure.

Very nice guy.

But yeah. So I just I just. And I want people to know that, yeah, like you said, they can do stuff. You can just get out there, meet ups. YouTube, learn from people, and you can do this.

I'm sure you've heard the book, The Go-Giver, right? Yeah. The book, The Go-Giver, it talks about, obviously, giving more in value than you receive. But I think the very last part of the book talks about being willing to receive. And guys, Carl's willing to receive now. Yeah, please, please, please send him deals. Uh, I'm going to say his number again and we'll post it and we'll make sure you can contact him at 7 0 4 9 9 5 5 3 8 5. If you have anything complicated, anything with a deceased owner, anything with, uh, some kind of messy title, any of these things we just talked about, you named about 20 different things. Yeah. Yeah, you were kind enough with your time to share on this podcast. So I would love for people to send you deals and for it to come back many, many times over for you. That'd be great. Awesome learning from you, Carl. And thank you so much for sharing such wisdom all the time with people in Charlotte and in other meetups that you're on all over the country. I'm sure everyone appreciates it more than you probably know.

Well, I appreciate you saying that. It makes me feel good. So, but bring me some deals. I still, I, uh, my Rolls Royce got towed away and so I need to get a new one. So please help me.

Yeah. Help. He needs money to get it out of the, uh, out of the lot. Right?

No, I let him keep it. It was $18,000 Rolls Royce. It kept breaking down and issue. So I just left it. They towed it off. I'm just, it's out of my mind. I don't have to worry about it. So, um, yeah, I'm not going to get another Rolls Royce. It was a classic 1991, but, uh, it's always breaking down. So I really don't need a Rolls Royce, but I, I, you know, I, Let's do deals together.

How about that? There you go. All right. There you go. And you're, and you're very fair. Obviously you're, you're looking at, you know, obviously the value that someone's bringing to the table by finding the deal. Yeah. All right. Well, good deal. Uh, thank you again, Carl. And we'll talk soon.

All right. Take it easy.

Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of The Deal Pen. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you consume podcasts. This way we'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. And remember, there's always more deals to be had in The Deal Pen. Until next time, friends.