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Ground Truth is a podcast by RealEstateAPI that cuts through PropTech abstraction to uncover how real estate actually gets built, financed, and operated. Host Vince Harris brings candid conversations with developers, operators, and technologists who shape the built environment—exploring what's working, what's broken, and where the industry needs better tools.
Learn more about RealEstateAPI at www.realestateapi.com
David (00:00)
The reality is 50 % of all deals that are contracted will never close.
Vince (00:06)
You heard that right. Nationwide, half of the houses that get put under contract fall apart. Why?
David (00:15)
Are you the only person on title? Are there any liens? Is it in foreclosure? You're not by chance in bankruptcy.
Vince (00:20)
Every question not asked is a potential deal killer.
David (00:27)
over 8000 files. I realized that there was a need for this.
Vince (00:32)
is David Olds, one of the largest transaction coordinators in the country. His team's behind the scenes fixing the broken contracts most people never see. ⁓
David (00:43)
We had to build something out from scratch. There was not anything in the marketplace.
Vince (00:48)
This is ground truth, candid conversations with top operators doing the work at scale. So product teams build what the field actually needs.
David (00:59)
I there was more AI. I'd love to be able to get that to 200 files that each coordinator can handle. Because if you can't solve those problems, you don't get paid.
Vince (01:10)
All right, well, welcome you guys to another episode of Ground Truth. The idea, of course, is to do exactly that, is get to the ground level, real deal, so the practical, tactical implications of the tools that our audience is making. We know that you guys are the best and brightest PropTech, Fintech, and home services tool makers, SaaS makers in the world. But we really want to talk to the people who are using.
products like yours, people who are doing the business in real life. And we have such a person with us here today. David Olds is nothing if not a doer. He has been at this a long time, thousands of transactions to his name. And I'm gonna let him tell his own story here in a moment, but we're really excited to have him. So David, welcome to Ground Truth. It's really great to be with you.
David (01:57)
Vance, thanks so much for having me on, man. Big honor to be here.
Vince (02:00)
Yeah, absolutely man. Well, listen, because we do tend to talk to techies, folks may not be so familiar with EZREI closings. Can you just tell a little bit about the business? I mostly want to talk about you. So we're going to spend a lot of time talking about David, but just, but, give them a primer on EZREI closings.
David (02:20)
Cool, well first off, you had me a little nervous when you said we talk to techies because I am the least technical person. I get my printer to work most days and I really feel like I wanna throw it out the window, so I'm not the tech guy. Yeah, so Easy REI Closings, we ⁓ sort of fell into this company a little bit backwards. We were building something for ourselves and realized that ⁓ it had a use or it was needed by investors all across the country. But essentially what we are is we are that middle person for an investor. We handle all of their paperwork.
all of the title problems and where they go between the investor, their buyer, their seller and the title company. And sometimes there are agents and mortgage brokers and all kinds of different people in there. But ultimately our goal is to take all the paperwork off of an investor's plate, whether they're a wholesaler or doing buy and hold, but we want to take all of that and we will handle that. They can outsource all that to us and they can really just really focus on the parts of the business that.
they should be doing the things they read Rich Dad Poor Dad and got into real estate for in the first place, which was talking to sellers and helping to solve those problems and then either finding great properties for themselves or finding properties that they can assign out to an end buyer and make that spread in between. So ultimately that's it. We just want to do the thing that they're probably terrible at and help their business grow.
Vince (03:36)
Yeah,
I love that. The reason I like that so much is that it parallels in a lot of ways our value prop. You know, when we talk to people in our space, the whole idea is to let them focus on building beautiful products and not have to worry about wrangling data, which can be a real nuisance, very, very expensive, very, very tedious. And our position is much like yours is, you know, you may or may not have a data engineering practice, but you certainly would rather focus on building a great product. So I hear you loud and clear on that.
David (04:07)
Yeah, it's the thing that gets you up out of bed, right? The thing that really jazzes you up. That's the thing that you wanna work on all day and not these other side projects that just keep pulling you away. And in our case, I tell people I am an old school just caveman wholesaler. I just wanna talk to people. I do not wanna sit down and go through contracts and make sure every box is checked. And same thing for developers, right? Like they wanna develop their thing, right? The crown jewel. And sometimes...
They don't wanna have to, I don't even know in the tech world, build all these kind of ancillary supporting things to make their stuff.
Vince (04:44)
Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right, man. Well, give us a bit of your origin story. Tell us how you got in this business.
David (04:50)
Yeah, I don't know that my story is any special, any better or worse than anybody else's. Grew up in, actually in Boston, moved to Florida in 93. My dad got laid off. So we left Boston. We went to Boca Raton, Delray Beach area, which was a beautiful place to be. Yeah, I worked for some hardware stores. I was a store manager for a big company in Florida called Scotty's Hardware Stores. I got married in 02. My wife and I bought our first house and I fixed it up.
and we sold it two years later because I needed to move closer to my job. And I realized after we went to closing that $50,000 that the house increased in value because we fixed it up, that that was tax-free money. And I thought, oh, well, that was kind of cool. So we did it again. And the next time it like $100,000 two years later. And that was...
you know, sort of the thing that got me really, really interested in the business side of real estate. Like I'd always been fascinated with like this old house and, you know, buying something and being able to see the vision and creating it, creating something newer and nicer and better that somebody else would value. But yeah, Red Rich Dad, Poor Dad, you know, kind of got the, started to understand some of the fundamentals of, you know, turning this into a business, joined a local real estate group and it sort of blew up from there. So during the 2000s,
We were in Florida and we did now they call it house hacking where you're living in the house, fixing it up, and then you resell it. And you start, we started doing that over and over and over again. And, know, brought in some, some other properties where we didn't necessarily live in it. And that was great until 2009, when it was the end of the world. Our last property was an absolute disaster. We, know, we thought we were going to make like a hundred thousand on it and lease optioned it for $5,000. And I was in construction or construction material sales. So I worked for 84 lumber. My wife was a.
superintendent for a building, a custom home builder. And you know, when the economy in Florida collapsed, like our jobs went in the wayside. So we had been looking at other markets to go to. ended up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which we moved here just for real estate. didn't know a single soul. And basically came here wanting to buy rental properties. But for those people who were around in 2009, like banks weren't lending money for apartment people to buy apartment buildings. They were busy taking properties back.
So we had to figure something out and that's when we got into wholesaling, which is sort of like the low level entry point for real estate investors where you can really legitimately get into the business with no money, right? just grit and hustle. You can figure this business out. And that was it. We were just, you know, it was too stupid to quit, too dumb to quit, I tell people. You we just did it over and over over again. Then we started buying properties for ourselves and.
long term rental properties that we added to our portfolio. then, goodness, in 2013, 14, we started rehabbing properties again once the market picked back up. So it's been a gradual, just sticking with it, staying in the batter's box, taking swings, getting some wins, getting some losses. But yeah, real estate's been amazing for me, for my family, for all of the people in our businesses. It's given me a life I probably don't deserve on those days.
Vince (08:05)
When did you discover that your specific sort of zone a genius was around the TC.
David (08:14)
Wow, you know, so, okay. So when we first started, we were just here in Chattanooga, Tennessee. We were operating in a single market. Over time, I had different partners that came in and they all brought something unique and special to the company. But one of them, ⁓ he wanted to, we started going to events kind of all over the country. And that's where I started meeting some other investors and wholesalers.
The one thing that I was really good at was the disposition side. So in real estate, you have acquisitions where you're buying properties, and then you have dispositions where you're taking those properties and you're selling them. And that was the part of the business that I was really good at, that sort of that back half. And part of selling a deal is working through title issues, through title problems, because what we do as investors, typically as we go out and we look for people who are in some type of distress or have some type of problem. And if we can solve those problems, whether it's death, divorce,
probate, bad tenants, utility shut off, whatever it is, we can solve those problems, we can get a better purchase price, right, a better price. But then to get to closing is you have to solve all of those problems. So anyways, I started coaching people on the dispositions, right? Some high level companies, people that do 40, 50 deals a month, that was the thing that I was really known for. And I didn't realize that the thing most people needed help with was,
helping to solve these types of transactions. Like I would get calls from some of the biggest wholesalers in the country all the time. Hey, I've got this problem, how do I solve it? ⁓ here's how you do that. Because we just had so much experience, because we did over 1600 deals in our own wholesaling company. So lots of experience there. Anyways, we were running transaction coordinators in our office here in Chattanooga that were helping with our business, because we were in over 100 markets at one point as a wholesaler. So like we were in a lot of different places.
And one of the things with wholesaling or real estate is you have to get the deal closed. Well, if you're in 28 markets or 100 markets or 30 markets, whatever it is, you're dealing with different title companies and attorneys in every single state and you need to figure out how to make that work, right? Because there's 50 states and some are title attorney states, some are title agency states, some are escrow states, and then you have 3,100 counties across the country that all do it differently.
Unknowingly, that was something that we became very good at. Then a couple of things happened. One, we were doing a lot of joint venture deals where you might get the property under contract and come to me and say, hey, can you sell it? Absolutely, no problem. What we were finding with those partners, and you know, asks, hey Vince, why do you keep bringing me deals? Like I'm taking 50 % of the deal and you can do this on your own. I love your money. Just curious. And a lot of the feedback we got was, well, you guys do a great job selling the property. Thank you. That's awesome.
⁓ but you also deal with the title company. We hate doing that. Cool. So that was one thing. Then we went into COVID. And if you remember everybody, we all thought it was the end of the world. And a lot of people, including us, we laid some people off. A lot of my friends that had large wholesale companies laid off their transaction coordinators. And the first thing they did was once things picked back up, they said, hey, can you know, do you still have your TC's, your coordinators? I said, sure. Can you help us just kind of.
work through some of these files while we get ramped back up. So that was it. It was something we created for ourselves. I'm okay at it, but my partner, my original transaction coordinator, her name is Heather. She's now my partner in a bunch of different companies. She's really the honestly, the mastermind, the detailed person, the integrator, where I'm more of the visionary. was my idea, but she's the one that, my God, makes it run every single day.
So yeah, we just ultimately just realized that there was a need for this in the industry. Nobody taught it, nobody teaches it. And because it's complicated, you we've looked at over 8,000 files and you know, 7,000 of them are probably completely different. There's always some weird thing that comes up in every file or, you know, people that don't want to cooperate or people that just, they do just weird stuff. Well, it's complicated.
Vince (12:21)
So let's tease that out a bit because I think that people in our business are familiar with the terms, you know, a visionary versus an integrator and they think of it in terms of, you know, the CEO versus the CEO kind of thing, but let's make it tactical. Where are all the places, where are all the potential points of failure in a transaction?
David (12:40)
Wow, there's so many. You know, they start on the front side where, you know, the wholesaler, the person out there doing the boots on the ground stuff, they're talking to Mrs. Smith, right? Mrs. Smith is a seller and they just don't ask good questions, right? They don't understand or they let certain things just blow right by them without realizing it. They may say, you know, Mrs. Smith, you know, great. You know, you want to sell your house? Fantastic. They don't bother to ask, are you the only person on title? Or...
Did you inherit it or are there any liens? Is it in foreclosure? You're not by chance in bankruptcy, right? So a lot of these questions are missed on the front side and then that sets up bad expectations. Cause they may say, well, great, Mr. Smith, we can get this done in 30 days. ⁓ but later we find out it's in bankruptcy and now it's going to take 90 or 120 days, right? Or they don't ask Mrs. Smith like, hey, where, you know, where did you get this property? Had they asked that and said, ⁓ why I inherited it from my mom.
Great, well that should trigger like 15 other questions. Well, was it deeded to you? Are there other people? Is it still in mom's name and you're like the person handling it and there's six heirs, right? There are just all these other questions that don't get asked. So that's probably the first failure point. The second one is, again, what do we do as investors? We go out and our job is to help people. Clearly that is it. But we will look for people with, you know.
they don't own the house or their retired landlord or, know, they, again, they inherited it from somebody or it's probate or bankruptcy foreclosure. But to get to the end of the, the end where you get paid, whether even if you're buying this for yourself or you're going to sell this deal to another investor, you have to have clear title. So this is not something that, investors are first investors are terrible, terrible at paperwork. We're all, and I've included myself in this, right? Probably.
Vince (14:31)
Your words, not mine.
David (14:33)
Yeah, hey man, I'm telling you, I'm an old school wholesaler. We, you know, terrible at paperwork, our accountants hate us. I got another message this morning, hey, we have 29 questions that we need you to answer. Attorneys, bookkeepers, property managers, like we're the worst at doing paperwork stuff. So we realized that we could come in and help them with these things, but that personality type is not the best at solving these weird, you know, what's a monument of title? What do you do when the...
their property was in a trust and that trust document is gone. What about the missing death certificate? What about the, you know, the heir who's in jail or the seller who's in Egypt? You know, what do you do to solve all of those problems? Because if you can't solve those problems, you don't get paid. Yeah, that's
Vince (15:17)
Give an example to the ⁓ no go ahead
David (15:19)
No, I was gonna say, the reality is 50 % of all deals that are contracted will never close. Wow. Like that's from the big CRM guys that you work with. That's from First American Title Insurance Company. In some states, it's as high as 60%, but on average, 50 % of deals won't close. And that's an average, right? Somebody who works in their hometown and does four deals a year may close on all four, but some people who are working in multiple markets on the virtual investing model,
They may close 20 % of their deals, right? But the average nationwide average is 50%. So that's our goal. Our goal is to not only compress time for our investors, our clients, get them paid quicker, but to get more of those deals over the finish line. Because, you know, after doing 8,000 of these, we see the problems coming a mile away and, you know, can help get them.
Vince (16:09)
Given that you've seen 8,000 files, what is the most common silent killer of a deal?
David (16:17)
you know, that's a good question, because there's so many.
Number one, man, bad expectations on the seller. And when I say seller, that can be a lot of people. Maybe there's heirs involved and just not everybody wanting to cooperate to get the deal sold. I would say that that is a really, really big one. Second behind that is probably bad expectations, right? Not letting the seller know, hey, know, Mrs. Smith, there are all of these issues. Hey, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna put.
I'm gonna put 120 days on this contract instead of 30 or 60 days, because I want you to know that I'm gonna be here to help you work through all of these problems, right? But sometimes wholesalers, some of these young kids, they get very excited and they're like, I'll get you your money in 10 days, just sign this contract. And then it's something that might take 45, 60, 80, 90 days to get through that process. Beyond that, the other killer is people who don't work with us, they're not staying in touch with their seller.
Right, they talk to them on day one, everybody's all excited, they get that contract signed, but then they don't, they switch hats, right? They go from acquisitions to now I gotta find a buyer for this, maybe they don't talk to Mrs. Smith again for two months and then they call her up and go, hey, we're ready to close. And she's like, who is this again? I'm like, David, ⁓ Davey, you seem like a nice boy, but like I haven't heard from you in two months, I didn't know that was real. So now they're gone.
One of the things that we really prioritize is not only good communication with our clients, the wholesaler, but one of the things that we realized in our business, right? And everything that we do here at EZREA Closing System Extension of what we did for us at Nationwide Property Liquidators is talking to those sellers every single week to make sure that they feel included and that they understand because lack of information, lack of communication will make them very nervous because this is not a normal thing, right? Most people don't sell a lot of houses in their lifetime.
Vince (18:16)
Yeah, to those points that's that's fantastic Intel directly from the ground given those two. Seemingly pretty common points of failure have you come across tools software tools that helps you to solve those that currently help you to solve those are mitigate.
David (18:34)
Yeah, again, I'm not the technology person. You probably would be much better with my COO on here. But yeah, we had to build something out from scratch. There was not anything in the marketplace that really was built for tracking our deals the way that we wanted to. So I think everybody who designs software, it's built with the way their brain works, right? I've used Freedomsoft and REI Blackbook and, know, RE Simply and all the other CRMs.
The way my brain works is I look at things like it's on a board, So it's kind of like, what do call them? Can-ban boards or there's kind of the same thing is used across a couple of different things. We use Airtable. And what I wanted was I wanted to be able to see that file. And then I wanted to see it go from one, we call it, know, one status to the next. So, you new file, talk to seller, waiting on buyer, solving title problems, know, closing scheduled, right? So I wanted to see something where we could watch those.
little box because I'm a very simple visual person. I wanted our clients to be able to log in and be able to see that their file was moving forward. Beyond that, I wanted to be able to click on it. I wanted it to explode and give it all of that information. So we use Airtable with the stacker as an overlay. I hope I'm saying that right. That's the client facing side ⁓ of our software. And that just gives it a very pretty look. And our clients can log in any time, day or night, two o'clock on a Tuesday morning.
And just, there's just complete transparency and they can see everything that we're doing on their behalf because, know, trusting somebody to close your deals, that's a big thing, right? These aren't small, these aren't small deals. You know, our clients are, it's 40,000, 80,000, 100,000, 18,000, whatever it is. It's very important to them that these deals get closed. So we take that responsibility very seriously. And you know, what we created is what I would want it. I would have wanted when I was running this in my wholesale business.
Vince (20:25)
So you're getting at a very common theme in our company, well, in our industry. This is not just in our company thing, but in building software, we talk a lot about is the software going to be highly opinionated or not? it's exactly what it sounds like, right? There are some things that have zero opinion. I'm not sure if you remember how big Podio was for a while. No opinion at all. Very modular, and that made it very flexible, but it also made it quite clunky. I'm not to disparage. It was a very powerful tool.
But there are other things that are very opinionated and what you're describing is that. And I think that viewers, listeners would do well to listen to folks on the ground if they have deep, deep expertise and maybe have a chat with them before you build a tool that purports to help them. Sure. Because there's only one opinion, but gosh, it's a good opinion.
David (21:15)
Yeah, and I think we see that with the most successful softwares out there. I know there's been a lot of softwares that have come and gone on the disposition side that, you know, they promote, can put your deal here and sell it to buyers all over the country. And a lot of them have failed because they don't come from somebody who actually does the business, right? And they didn't take that feedback from their clients. I've had a lot of them pitch to us for us to help promote. And I've tried to explain like, listen, what you're doing doesn't make any sense.
I mean, I don't want to get into the intonation. I get it. But some of them were like, as a real wholesaler, I looked at it. I'm like, would try to explain to this girl, I'm like, this doesn't work. What's your, like, this doesn't make, I get the fantasy that you've got, because I've had fantasies in my company too about how things were going to run, but this just is not viable. And now that company is, I don't think it's around anymore, but you know, great software and CRMs, you know, the, the, the couple of big ones.
They're owned and operated by people who are real investors and they get it. Now they're all a little bit different, like they work because the owner, the developers, you know, actually do the business.
Vince (22:21)
Yeah, I love that. Are there I love the fact too that you did go ahead and build your own thing because there wasn't something out there. ⁓
David (22:29)
Yeah, mean,
it was a lot of work and a lot of money. there's still, you sometimes we look at and go, you know, if we decide to exit this company, should we have built something completely proprietary from scratch instead of building it on top of other platforms? You know, I don't I don't really know what the right answer is. I've gotten mixed reviews from from different &A type people. yeah, ultimately, we wanted something where we could get up and running just as absolutely quickly as possible. And it's evolved over time. It's you know, that that
core platform that we built, it's still intact, luckily it had flexibility that our clients could say, hey, I want to be able to see this or I want to know that EMD has been collected. ⁓ great. That's easy. can add that in right onto your dashboard. We can show that EMD has been collected and received on this property. So yeah, we're very in tune with what our clients are looking for. Sometimes they want stuff that we can't do, but we do the best we can.
Vince (23:27)
To that point, good on you for actually building something and it sounds like it was something that was flexible enough to grow and be modified. there things that, and this is a safe space, are there things that you maybe are still stitching together? You got a little duct tape MacGyver situation going on. We didn't build something proper, but we're just sort of duct taping, taping something together to make it work. Process either.
David (23:52)
Yeah, I don't think I'm trying to think on the software, the platform side. It's pretty straightforward. Luckily we picked Airtable and Stacker, which are relatively versatile for what we're looking for. One thing from day one, Stacker did tell us that we could white label that UI, know, ⁓ what the client sees so that we can brand it with each coach. like, apparently they did away with that like one month after we signed up.
So that was not ideal. So that's probably one of biggest things we get from people is, know, Coach XYZ wants to have their name on it, which we can't do. On the other side, we've struggled with the CRM part. We've gone through Kajabi and ClickFunnels and KEEP and Infusionsoft, and now we're on Go High level. And none of them are exactly perfect. You know, we use KEEP, which is allegedly really great at the affiliate side and tracking, which was pretty good, but the rest of the software was old and clunky and outdated.
We made the switch over to go high level, cause that's what my team wanted to do. That took us about a six months to transition over, but it just doesn't exactly do. It just never does everything that you want it to do or track it in the way that you'd like. So if there's any place where we kind of have had to cobble some things together with, know, APIs and web hooks and all, I'm using all of my technical terms here. Like you're getting them all. ⁓ I don't, I'm not even sure what they mean half the time, but.
Vince (25:13)
Come on, we love it here. We love it, man.
David (25:19)
You know, I'll talk to our, have an, you know, in-house, you know, guy who handles all of our web stuff. And he's like, ⁓ I really can't quite do that, but I think I can do it. Like, let's just make sure stuff works first before we start getting real extravagant and building a, you know, a house of, you know, from popsicle sticks that could fall at any time. So, so yeah, there's always things there where I wish it would do more.
Vince (25:42)
If if somebody could give you a magic wand you know what what TC what process issue would you wave.
David (25:50)
Man, I would love to... I wish there was more AI that we could implement into our business. I just don't think it's there. It's there yet. I think, ultimately, I think down the road there will be, you know, my partner's really good at tracking the number of files that each coordinator can handle. And they're probably anywhere between 40 and 60, depending upon the person. But I'd love to be able to get that to 200 files, right? So, eventually, and this is...
This is our Q1 project for next year. We've got other stuff that working on this year, but to really start to look at what can, whether it's automation or AI, what are some things that we can add into our processes to just to spin the wheel faster for us, right? So that maybe I can bring pricing down, just do more files with less people. So I think that's ultimately a goal for us that we really, really, really wanna look at, just really efficiencies.
Our team is absolutely amazing. They're all in office here. We have a 16,000 square foot office here in Chattanooga, Tennessee, but how can we do more? How can I make sure that somebody doesn't forget something, right? And I don't even know really what that looks like, if we need to bring in a specialist next year and really just tear everything apart and see where technology has advanced far enough to.
start to plug some of those things in. that would be the magic wand that I think we're looking for.
Vince (27:20)
That's huge. love it. Before we wrap up, I would be remiss if I didn't ask you some big picture stuff. We love getting down into the weeds and nitty gritty, but you've got such a wealth of experience. I'm curious what you're seeing in the market. do you feel like deals are harder or easier to close today? And it could be a function of market dynamics or tech dynamics. You can go whichever way you want with it, but I'm just curious your thoughts on the market.
David (27:43)
No, no difference on closing a deal. What we do is very simple. In real estate, we buy low, we sell high. It's very, very simple, nothing to it. And there, I think you're probably asking a different question than what I'm gonna answer, but the fundamentals of closing a deal are pretty straightforward. As long as everybody is on board, and I mean, heirs and sellers and husbands and wives, and they're not in middle of a nasty divorce, any deal can be closed. But those things don't change. none of those issues.
are any easier or better than they were in 1970 or today, right? Those are people issues. ⁓ The business itself, my God, far easier than it was when I started in 2002. I tell people, like, we had newspaper ads and bandit signs and door knocking. And we freaking made it work. My God, the number of tools that people have at their disposal today, it's mind numbing and they still cry and complain.
And we had a sales call yesterday and the guy was basically like, yeah, I want to pay you like less than a thousand bucks and I want you to do all the transactions and like, I want you to sell the deal too. I'm like, I don't know if it's laziness or entitlement or just people are just, know, thinking technology can just do absolutely everything. Like I want to put $10,000 out there for marketing and I want somebody else to run the marketing. I want a bot to close the deal.
I want somebody else to sell the deal and I just want to collect a hundred. Yeah, that's all. I don't think technology is there brother. And if it was, I would use that technology for me, not for you, but.
Vince (29:16)
Hey, listen, so I just add water mindset. It seems to be like pervasive. Yeah.
David (29:23)
It's wild and I don't understand. I mean, literally, the ways that you can get in front of buyers and sellers now, it's so advanced compared to what it was 10 years ago, five years ago, that you just, my God, if you just have the least little bit of gumption and hustle, you can absolutely dominate in this business. Yeah, are there more people wholesaling? 100%, but 90 % of them are banana heads. They don't answer the phone when you call.
I mean, they don't show up. you know, they think they're to do this from Starbucks. it like, it's stunning for me. For realtors too, like this isn't, we're not letting them off the hook. can't tell you how many times I've. Amen, brother. I'm like, you know what? I'd love to, I'd love to look at that house, call the number. No answer. No answer. So yeah, it's, it's, it's just shocking how apathetic and lazy people are. And you know, they want technology to do.
Vince (30:01)
Showing up is like 80 % of it.
David (30:22)
do all of the things and they don't want to put in the work.
Vince (30:25)
That's right, that's right. So let's leave the folks with some advice, something aspirational to not be a banana head, right? If we would admonish you all to avoid banana head behavior. So, you know, what are the top guys, what are the top, you know, 5 % of wholesalers and guys that you transact with, how do they behave differently?
David (30:47)
Yeah, they are very focused. Like the people that I've seen succeed, they have evolved their business and they have one road, one road that they're really, really great at. They don't try to do every single thing. So they're not trying to wholesale, ⁓ I'm gonna do this storage unit over here. ⁓ you know what? I heard somebody say land development's gonna be great. Let me try to develop 48 acres in the middle of Texas. ⁓ you know, let's start doing creative deals, right? Because you just create this mind map that looks like spaghetti in your business.
And one thing that we preach over and over and over and over again is simple is scalable, right? So if you want to have a scalable business, you know, pick one thing, do it really well. This nonsense that we always see on Facebook, Warren Buffett says you have to have six streams of income. No, Warren Buffett said get one, get one that works really good. And then over time, when that's operating on its own, then you can start to add some, you know, some parallel or ancillary verticals around that that kind of make it go faster. to
want to be a wholesaler and then sell prepaid legal and then you're in the multi-level marketing for travel. ⁓
Vince (31:51)
You took it all the way back David, not PPL.
David (31:54)
Prepaid
legal. Prepaid legal, right? Or you're be an am way and you've got six streams of income. I mean, it gets nonsensical because your attention's being divided by six. And I will tell you the worst person, the worst goofball that I go drag off the street in here and spend a week with teaching them wholesaling, if they're just focused, they will knock that person's butt in the dirt every single day. So pick one thing, be focused. And real estate's amazing. I am not any smarter than anybody else.
And it literally has given me a life that has been spectacular. I've been all over the world, I have a great team. I get to go speak on stages and do awesome podcasts just because we got good at one thing. You know, don't ask me to change spark plugs in your car because I can barely get the hood open. Not that guy. I you brother. I know what I'm I hear you. That's not it.
Vince (32:43)
So this, is amazing. I think there's a wealth of information for folks to take away from this. And just to, to recap, know, who it is that you are getting this advice from, listen, you don't get to 20 years in the business, 8,000 transactions, a 16,000 square foot office. You don't get there without having figured some things out, right. And really having a well-oiled machine. So what you heard from David Olds, who has checked all three of those boxes is that
half of transactions aren't gonna close. Now maybe it's because you're doing things in multiple markets and maybe you do better, you have a better batting average locally, but that's a remarkable stat, 40 to 50 % of transactions don't
David (33:24)
When I first heard it like two years ago, I was just mind boggled. But yeah, let me say this, because I'm the person who gets to come on these podcasts and gets a lot of the accolades. But believe me, the only reason any of this works is because we built a great team. I'm not the person out there closing deals, right? I've got 25 people out there that are doing amazing work. I've got a partner that somehow manages to keep it all together.
you know, take all my wacky ideas and move it forward. So, you know, to build something like that, if you want to scale, and I'm not saying scaling is right for everybody, that's a different conversation. But, you know, if you are going to scale, you're gonna bring a lot of people in and, you know, out of every 10, maybe five won't work out, maybe three are gonna be good for a year or two, but one or two of those 10, they're gonna be the true believers, the people that believe in your vision and wanna march next to you and wanna grow the thing.
And those are the people that you need to over time just really surround yourself with. And it's not an overnight thing. It definitely takes time. And there are gonna be days where you just believe it, believe at the end of the day, feeling like you got hit in the face by a softball at full speed. But you you just, you have to, you have to believe in your own vision too, and know that what you're building is something that will help other people.
Vince (34:44)
I think that's a great place for us to wrap it. You've got an advice really on three levels from David for the entrepreneur, focus and building a team, right? For the investors actually focus is another one is he saying you can't do storage and also pre-pay the legal, probably wouldn't advise it. But to my techies out there, to the developers, again, this sounds like a big opportunity. I reach out to David, I reach out to his team if half of deals aren't closing.
And if he's telling you that he'd like to see more AI helping TC, helping transaction coordination, this ⁓ is an idea for some developer or some product team out there. So I hope you guys will take him up on that.
David (35:23)
I would love to talk to some people and kind of explore what that would look like.
Vince (35:27)
Yeah, I love it, man. I love it. Any things that you got coming up, you want to plug anything else you want to say to the folks before we wrap up?
David (35:34)
No, that's it. know, happy to be a resource for people who were looking for help, you know, just figuring out real estate. I love talking about it. I could talk about it all day. You know, if you're in this space and you're looking for someone to help you close deals, happy to do that too. But really, I just appreciate being invited on. I had a great time. Yeah.
Vince (35:51)
I did too man thank you for coming on I really appreciate it so yeah it's another ⁓ episode of ground truth in the books man and if I'm being transparent we ⁓ you are going to be the first I think official guest so.
I didn't want to didn't want to spook you. didn't want to spook you. Yeah, we've lined up some pretty heavy hitter guests. I'm excited about people who have said yes, who have raised their hand. And so, ⁓ man, what a way to get out of the gate, right, is with David Olds, who, again, 8000 transactions under his belt, man, we really appreciate it. Yeah. Awesome, dude. This is great. Cool. We'll talk to you again soon.
David (36:28)
Thank you.