Zack Boothe owned a window cleaning business and use to listen to our show while working and now is on our show! Zack shares his marketing strategy to find deals that you can wholesale, flip, or hold for the long-term. He uses a unique system that helps him find 2,000 distressed property every week with just one 30 hr part-time driver who is driving for dollars.
Zack Boothe Real Estate Background:
- Left his window cleaning business in 2017 to become a real estate investor
- On track to do over $1 Million in 2019, teaches others how to find properties for $.50 on the dollar
- Based in Salt Lake City, Utah
- Say hi to him at www.DFDmastery.com
Best Ever Tweet:
“The difference that I have with the systems and the software that we’re using is, you can go with one part time guy and find thousands of distressed properties every single week.” – Zack Boothe
TRANSCRIPTION
Theo Hicks: Hello Best Ever listeners, and welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I’m Theo Hicks, I’ll be the host today, and today we’re speaking with Zack Boothe. Zach, how are you doing today?
Zack Boothe: I’m doing awesome. Super-awesome to be here.
Theo Hicks: Yep, I’m excited to have you and looking forward to finding a little bit more about you. So Zack left his window cleaning business in 2017 to become a real estate investor. He’s on track to do over $1 million in 2019, and he also teaches others how to find properties for 50 cents on the dollar. So you better believe we’re going to talk about how to do that. Zach is based in Salt Lake City, Utah, and you can say hi to him at dfdmastery.com. So Zack, before we get started, can you tell us a little bit more about your background and what you’re focused on now?
Zack Boothe: Yeah. So like you said, I was a window cleaner, and it’s actually surreal to be on this podcast because as a window cleaner, I would listen to this podcast all the time. So it’s pretty weird how life happens and it takes you in certain directions.
But like you said, I was on that window cleaning business, and I ran that for almost 10 years, and towards the end of it, that was 2016, I was just burnout in the industry; not something I aspire to do anymore, even though I had had a ton of success there. I had YouTube videos with over a million views. One of my YouTube videos got used on the History channel, so I ended up on the history channel because of window cleaning, and had a great business that I’d worked so many years on… But I wanted to be in real estate and I had dabbled in it, done a couple deals – some amazing, some I lost money, but I needed a change of pace. So I hired a coach who’s actually the second coach I had hired, but I really got traction with this coach back in 2017, the very beginning of it.
The coach is Tom Krol and Cody Hofhine, and they taught me about something known as wholesaling. I believe some of your people are familiar with the process, I’ve heard it on your podcast a few times… So for those that don’t know what it is, essentially you’re finding properties at a discount, people that want to sell for speed and convenience, you put those properties under contract, and those contracts are assignable, meaning I can sell that purchase agreement to a flipper or to another investor and they close on that contract and pay you a fee to sign the contract to them. So I started learning that strategy, and I actually sold my business. At the time I actually just told my partner, “I quit, you can buy me out, but I’m done. I have to move on.” And that was March 2017, I had just purchased their course…
I went as hard as I could and did my very first wholesale assignment fee in April of 2017. I made $10,000 on that first deal. So that was a mind-blowing proof of concept. From there, I worked really hard that year and did a little over $100,000 by the end of 2017. By the end of 2017 I knew I needed to do something different as far as marketing. I wanted to have a business that profit margins on $100,000 — I wasn’t netting, I wasn’t bringing in $100,000, not even half that. So I was making much less than the window cleaning, and I didn’t quite know where to take it or how to grow it, and I read a book called Multifamily Millions… Not sure if you’re familiar with that book, Theo. Have you seen that book before?
Theo Hicks: It sounds familiar, but I’ve not read it myself.
Zack Boothe: It’s a great one, and he said something in there that really caught my attention. So he’s talking about doing large syndications, a lot of what Joe talks about, and something that I aspire to do. He said that you are not in the business of real estate, your business is not real estate. You’re in the business of marketing and your product is real estate. It really got me thinking how important my marketing was and how I really needed to change things up a little bit.
So I started doing what’s called driving for dollars. It was a marketing strategy that I thought that I could make some big improvements and really scale a business around it. It was just a test, I wasn’t 100% sure if it would work. So what drive for dollars is, if you don’t know what it is, is you drive around neighborhoods looking for houses that have any physical signs of neglect, because the goal is to find someone that wants speed and convenience for their house. You want to be a pawnshop for people that want to just get rid of that house.
So I was trying to find physical signs in neglect, I was driving around neighborhoods, writing down addresses, looking it up on county records and reaching out to those people through a phone call or piece of mail… And I started getting results. I quickly learned that writing down the addresses — there’s a much better way, there’s apps out there that you can add properties quickly to an Excel spreadsheet with the data, and there’s data searching ability with third-party companies, and I really started to learn the system.
Towards the end of 2018 we did about $450,000 or so in sales, and that’s mainly assigning contracts. We did flip a few houses, but it was just turning over our inventory quickly. I was so excited about it; I was pulling a profit margin and my life was changed. I was making a certain amount of money at that point, my profit margins were much higher than my window cleaning business at that point, and I was able to go on vacations and have freedom that I had never had before, and it was pretty life-changing.
You might be thinking like, “How does this have anything to do with you listening? Why would you even care about this story?”, but that’s where everything changes. This is where I started focusing more on others and focusing on bringing more value to people, and the reason that I’m actually on the podcast today. So that was an awesome year for me, and towards the end of it, I had a goal and something that was silly from the time I was a little boy… My family – I grew up working hard, and I had a lawn mowing business, and I remember asking my dad — while I’m mowing lawns at this giant house, and I remember asking my dad how much money they made, and if they were a millionaire… And he said, “Yeah, I’m sure they’re millionaires, and they probably make $300,000, $400,000 a year.” I remember thinking to myself, “One day, I’ll make a million dollars in a year,” and that’s stuck with me ever since.
So I had this inner ambition to do a million dollars in a year, and I didn’t know how I could get my investment business bigger. I felt like I had tapped out my marketing channel and I wanted to get it to that next level. So I was racking my brain, and when you focus on something, when you truly write down a goal and focus on it, how opportunities come… I had a friend reach out to me that I met through a real estate meetup, and he invited me to join him and be an accountability partner on a self-help journal called Living Your Best Year Ever by Darren Hardy. So I did that, and one of my big goals was to generate a million dollars in revenue in 2019, and we’re October now, 2019, and we’re on track to hit that. But in there, when you create that goal, it talks about the importance to give away whatever you’re trying to receive. I definitely did not have a million dollars in my pocket to give away, and I wasn’t even sure how that was even possible to give away a million dollars before I had a million dollars… So I really started racking my brain, and in November 2017 I came to the conclusion that I needed to bring on some students, just a handful, teach them my marketing channel, and help them put a million dollars into their businesses by implementing my marketing system that I was using, and that’s where everything changed.
So many of these guys that I brought in — I made sure I brought in some very experienced investors, some very new investors, and I wanted it all across the country, because I wanted to make sure this worked everywhere; what apps, what systems didn’t work and did work. I’ve spent just about 12 months perfecting the system with my beta testing students, my guinea pigs that believed in me and trusted in me enough to do this. And with their intelligence and their intelligent questions, we were able to perfect a marketing system that changed my business. And that’s essentially what I’m doing now, is I’ve been able to build a team around this marketing system that’s servicing all of my contracts. I haven’t signed a contract myself in a little over 12 months now. All of it’s done by my team, and it’s allowed me to focus 100% on helping other people build out a marketing channel that they can build their business around.
So that’s really what I’m focused on, that’s really what I’m working towards, and it’s been so rewarding to see the success of my students. And it’s been awesome to hit my goal, and to be working towards my own goals, but it was really surprising to me how much more fulfilling it is to bless someone else’s life than really to focus on my own. So it’s been an incredible journey to this point.
Theo Hicks: Thanks for sharing that. So do you mind just going over that marketing system that you were just mentioning? I’m assuming it’s for wholesaling, so marketing to find deals… You said that you teach others how to find properties for 50 cents of the dollar, so maybe you could walk us through what your process is to find a lot of these parameters, so if I have a large amount of deal flow coming in of properties, that you’re able to put under contract at 50 cents on the dollar.
Zack Boothe: Great question. This is for finding single-family homes and small multifamily is what this works for. It’s probably not the best strategy for finding large syndications or large apartment complexes, but it’s a great strategy for smaller investments.
It doesn’t matter if you’re wanting to flip the houses or if you’re wanting to wholesale them or assign the purchase agreements, or if you’re wanting to pick up rentals, small single-family or small multifamily. If you’re trying to pick up rentals, this marketing strategy is for that purpose. How you make money off these leads, that’s not something that I’m as focused on.
So driving for dollars is not new. It’s one of the most proven, most used over the course of real estate investing. It’s everywhere on YouTube, you can look it up; driving for dollars is everywhere. The biggest difference is the scale and the system that we’ve been able to put together. So traditionally, to go out and find 50 houses in a week that are distressed that you go then market to, that’s quite a bit. In the past, you’d have to pay quite a bit of money or a large percentage of the profits to what they would call bird dog, or to the person that would go out and find these properties. The difference that I have with the systems, the software that we’re using, is you can go with one part-time guy and find thousands of distressed properties every single week.
Our marketing – we have a goal of over 2000 properties that we add, that have physical signs of distress, to our marketing list every single week, and we do that, like I said, with one 30-hour part-time driver. So the ability to scale it at a profitable rate is the biggest difference in what we’re doing, and then our course talks about that – the importance of hiring the right person, managing that person; that’s a huge part of the course. But also, obviously the setup of how to use these apps and the software systems…
The app is a public app, you can buy it; it’s called DealMachine. I actually have a discount that I’ll make available to the Best Ever listeners out there. So if you want to try out the app, it’s called DealMachine, and the discount code is PIN. You’ll get some extra credits and so forth with that discount. But we’re using that, and then also the systems and part of the apps that we use, our marketing, as far as how often we reach out to those people, how we reach out to those people, we use a combination of mail and cold-calling. In the course, I break out exactly the timeframe and everything that’s there.
Theo Hicks: So you said you add 2,000 properties every single week with one 30-hour a week, part-time driver.
Zack Boothe: Exactly.
Theo Hicks: That’s a little bit over 60 properties an hour, so over one property a minute. So how are they doing that while they’re driving around their car?
Zack Boothe: Isn’t that incredible? So the data, as far as pins per hour, as we call it, or houses that get added per hour– yes – it is a lot. It’s 60 per hour. We’ve seen anywhere between 20 to 80 properties per man hour that can be added through this system. And the differences are [unintelligible [00:13:17].19] how many you add is your criteria (it’s a big one), but also the market that you live in.
So the beauty of Utah is we have a very gridded out system. The way the city has been developed and the neighborhoods have been developed, it is a very nice, organized grid system. So it’s very easy to go up one street, down the next, up the next and down the next. So we’re able to find properties much faster.
So one of my students said — let me give you an example [unintelligible [00:13:45].12] South Carolina – his streets aren’t as organized, there’s lots of hills, and he’s only pinning about 20 per hour because of that. The houses are a little more spread out. It’s a county that’s not as populated, the houses are a little bit more rural, there’s two, three-acre lots and things like that.
But the cool thing is it doesn’t matter the size of the market. A larger market – you’re gonna have more deals, but more competition, more investors, and then in a smaller market, you’ll have less investors and less deals, but it still makes sense. This marketing is working in every market.
Theo Hicks: Alright, Zack, what is your best real estate investing advice ever?
Zack Boothe: If you want to be an investor, focus on your marketing. I think that people don’t realize it, but you need to be a marketer if you want to do really well in this business.
Theo Hicks: Yep, and you said the advice you got from that book, Multifamily Millionaires, is that you’re not in the real estate business; you’re in the marketing business and real estate is your product. So it makes sense, and that is your best ever advice. All right, Zack, are you ready for the best ever lightning round?
Zack Boothe: I am ready.
Theo Hicks: Perfect.
Break: [00:14:42]:05] to [00:15:28]:08]
Theo Hicks: All right, Zack, what is the best ever book you’ve recently read?
Zack Boothe: Recently. 30Days.com, it’s been incredible.
Theo Hicks: If your business were to collapse today, what would you do next?
Zack Boothe: Real estate. [laughs] I’d get right back into it, it’s never going anywhere.
Theo Hicks: What deal did you lose the most money on and how much did you lose?
Zack Boothe: My very first flip. It’s been about six years now. I can’t remember the exact numbers, but I remember it was just shy of $20,000 is what I overall lost.
Theo Hicks: This is you unique to you. What is the highest window you ever cleaned?
Zack Boothe: The highest window? Man, I avoided high risers. Probably three stories, I didn’t do anything too crazy.
Theo Hicks: Those high rise cleaners – I don’t think I could do that. I’d be too afraid.
Zack Boothe: Yeah, and I never did the bosun chair, whatever they called it. I never did any of the high rise stuff. That’s scary, no.
Theo Hicks: Then lastly, what is the best ever place to reach you?
Zack Boothe: You can reach me through the online link, dfdmastery.com. There’s also a link for a live and replay webinar, where I talk about marketing and more about the course. So if you’re interested in that, you can go there. If you want to just reach out to me personally, I’m pretty active on Facebook, Zack, Boothe, so you can shoot me a private message that way too.
Theo Hicks: Thank you for sharing that, and Zack, thank you for coming on this show and sharing your story with us. To summarize, you went from window cleaner to a wholesaler, to coach, and you walked us through how that process evolved pretty quickly from 2016 to today, going from cleaning windows and running a window cleaning business to achieving your childhood goal of generating a million dollars in sales this year. So congratulations on that. Not many people can do that for the first few years, so that’s great to hear.
Then you also talked about your marketing system for finding single-family residences or small multifamilies for 50 cents on the dollar, and your strategy is driving for dollars, and in combination with various technologies and hiring the right part-time person, you’ll be able to find at 20 to 80 properties per man hour. You mentioned that in addition to obviously finding the right person and using the correct technology, is making sure you’ve got your criteria set and then the amount of property you’ll find is going to be based off of the setup of the markets. So there’s a very easily drivable market with a high concentration of houses; pretty easy if you drive streets. You can find a lot more than if houses are spread out and you can obviously drive a lot longer in between homes.
Then your best ever advice, which as you live by, is to focus on your marketing, and again, that great quote from Multifamily Millionaires is that you’re not in the business of real estate, you’re in the business of marketing, and your product is real estate. Thanks again, Zack, for coming on the show and sharing your advice with us. Best Ever listeners, thank you for listening. Have a best ever day and we will talk to you tomorrow.