Today on Unstoppable REI Wealth I am joined by Dom Santaniello. Dom is currently Co-Owner of Naples Home Buyers & Naples Realty Group, an active Landlord and is a Licensed Real Estate Broker in Mass & CT. Prior to working as a Real Estate Broker, Investor and Entrepreneur, he worked as a Natural Gas Pipeline Engineer for Kinder Morgan, the third largest energy company in North America before he made the switch to being full time in the real estate world.Dom and his business partner, Luke Giusto, have closed over 50 deals together that range from Single Family fix & flips to Multi-family Buy & Holds and Multi-family BRRR projects. They have quickly built a seven-figure rental property portfolio that consists of over 25 stabilized, turnkey, Class B+ units that produce an average of $500-$650 NET profit per door.Naples Realty Group, another entity controlled by Luke & Dom, is an up and coming real estate brokerage fueled by an entrepreneurial mindset and motivated sales agents. The brokerage was formed in 2020 and has quickly scaled to 15 agents, across two states and counting! A unique culture is shared at Naples Realty Group and is fueled by financial freedom, hard work and most importantly, customer service. Many of the Naples Agents are real estate investors themselves and specialize in investment properties and negotiating favorable deals for their clients. You don't want to miss this one! As always if you need anything come find me at billyalvaro.com and billyssecrets.com Talk to you all soon!
Today on Unstoppable REI Wealth I am joined by Dom Santaniello.
Dom is currently Co-Owner of Naples Home Buyers & Naples Realty Group, an active Landlord and is a Licensed Real Estate Broker in Mass & CT. Prior to working as a Real Estate Broker, Investor and Entrepreneur, he worked as a Natural Gas Pipeline Engineer for Kinder Morgan, the third largest energy company in North America before he made the switch to being full time in the real estate world.
Dom and his business partner, Luke Giusto, have closed over 50 deals together that range from Single Family fix & flips to Multi-family Buy & Holds and Multi-family BRRR projects. They have quickly built a seven-figure rental property portfolio that consists of over 25 stabilized, turnkey, Class B+ units that produce an average of $500-$650 NET profit per door.
Naples Realty Group, another entity controlled by Luke & Dom, is an up and coming real estate brokerage fueled by an entrepreneurial mindset and motivated sales agents. The brokerage was formed in 2020 and has quickly scaled to 15 agents, across two states and counting! A unique culture is shared at Naples Realty Group and is fueled by financial freedom, hard work and most importantly, customer service. Many of the Naples Agents are real estate investors themselves and specialize in investment properties and negotiating favorable deals for their clients.
You don't want to miss this one!
As always if you need anything come find me at billyalvaro.com and billyssecrets.com
Talk to you all soon!
[00:00:00] What's going on guys. This is Billy Alvaro the Unstoppable BA and this is unstoppable REI wealth episode. And number 40 today, I interviewed Dom Santinello. Dom comes from Western Massachusetts. He's 29 years old. And if you've been listening to this podcast, you know, we're teaching you or interviewing people on how to start growing, ultimately scale your.
[00:00:20] Today with Dom's interview. He's going to go over how he got started in the business just 18 months ago. And in June of this past year, 2021, he quit his job full time and started getting into real estate investment biz with his partner. He has over 20. A whole buy and hold properties that he's making five to $600 each a month.
[00:00:40] He has a brokerage company that he started from scratch with, I think from memory about 18 brokers or 20 brokers on his staff. And he has a full-time fix and flip company where he's marketing for properties to buy fix, and flip and wholesale. And if he doesn't wholesale, he puts them into his rental portfolio.
[00:00:57] The guy is a smart, bright young guy. He's 29 years old. Like I said, an engineer with his background and it took a lot of frigging. To get out and quit his job and to do this full time, you're going to learn a lot on this interview. He's very articulate. He goes through exactly what he did, how he did his creative financing, how we put together as systems.
[00:01:17] And he's going to leave you with a lot of really good information. I hope you enjoy it and I'll catch you on the next one. Welcome to unstoppable real estate investing wealth. My name is Billy Alvaro, AKA the Unstoppable BA former billion dollar mortgage banker gone bankrupt turned professional real estate investor where each week you'll learn the tools, strategies, systems, and secrets by.
[00:01:42] And other, a highly successful real estate investing entrepreneurs use to start, grow and scale their businesses, creating massive profits and how you can too. And we'll teach you how to put those profits to work. So you no longer have to get ready to finally experience financial freedom and generational wealth.
[00:02:01] Now let's get started.
[00:02:06] Welcome back. Welcome back everybody. My name is Billy Alvaro, the Unstoppable BA. And as you know, you listening to Unstoppable REI Wealth now listened to for a little bit. I think we're coming up to episode number 40 with this young gentlemen, Don, we're going to be interviewing in a second. This podcast is about starting, growing and scaling your business.
[00:02:24] And so each week I'm going to be bringing somebody that's going to fit one of those three molds. Today, we have someone. Going from the slot fees. He's now getting into the growth phase, young guy, 29 years old out of Western, Massachusetts, Dom. Santinello a little Guinea like myself. How you doing buddy?
[00:02:41] I'm doing awesome. I'm a fired up after that intro. So let's get it done. So listen, let's do a little backstory on you because I think it's important for the people who are listening, who are in that start and grow phase on what it takes to actually leave a secure job. Now you're a bright guy. You have your.
[00:02:58] You were an engineer, you had a secure job in corporate America. I think you will make a little over six figures a year. Is that an accurate. Yeah. I mean, honestly, I was kind of well into the six figures, if you will. And the story kind of the same immigrant father came from Italy. Save money, 401k, go to college, get a good job.
[00:03:16] Got an MBA, got a, a great job at a fortune 500 company. Worked there for seven years and kind of halfway through there figured this isn't for me and started real estate on the side and kind of did the two in parallel. So same backstory as a lot of people where they started doing the nine to five checked, all the boxes, made everyone happy besides themselves, and then tried to figure out how to.
[00:03:39] But you know what though? Congratulations, because you figured it out at a young age and a lot of people go through life miserable in a dead end job, hating what they do when they wake up. When they, and they're 50 years old, like what the hell am I doing with myself? So as a young guy to realize that congrats brother, because you're on the right path, I want to go through the mindset that you had to have as you went from corporate America to other do this real estate investing thing, the science I'm actually going to quit my job.
[00:04:08] And go full fledged entrepreneur into the real estate realm. What was it like mindset wise for you to start doing this and going down that path there two mindsets, like one listening to everyone else was a negative mindset, a fear-driven mindset, scared, worried you name it. And then the other one was.
[00:04:27] Drive. I was just mad. Right? So those are the two mindsets. And at first I didn't come into this thing, like, Hey, I'm going to quit my job and be a real estate investor. It kind of started slow where I was trying to figure out, you know, I got a lot of student debt. I want. Figure out how to live for free. I want to make some extra money on the side.
[00:04:47] I was the guy at 22 years old, had a six-figure engineering job was bartending at night. I just, I'd never, I've always had multiple jobs. Couldn't stop. Always thinking, how do I make more money? I topped out my bonus tier at work. Kind of figured, all right, why am I going to work another 10 hours a week? If I'm already capped on salary bonus stock, all that stuff.
[00:05:07] So started bartending and started talking to people. My aunt at the time was a real estate broker, had a small mom and pop shop said, why don't you get your license? Got my real estate license started doing open houses, run around with investors, figured out I could buy a two family for pretty much no money down and live there.
[00:05:26] And as soon as I did that, that's when everything clicked and I started researching. Really networking and getting into it. And that's where the mindset shifted. And I was like, I just meeting people and 30 years old, low thirties that are multi multimillionaire is in our small market here. Really got me thinking.
[00:05:44] And a lot of them were actually X engineers. So it was interesting. Having the finance and the numbers background and being handy and all that stuff. I felt I had all the important buckets to the industry and that's what really got the mindset going. And so coming from immigrant family hardworking, they came here, probably deal with scraping by like my grandparents did where your, where your mom and dad, a little apprehensive when you told them that you were going to make the shift and go into real estate investing.
[00:06:13] Yeah, definitely. I mean, my mom was born and she's not an Italian immigrant. My father was, so he was a little more grain. And why don't you do both? You've got a good gig. Keep it going, just do it on the side. It's not bad logic. It just, for me, I don't, I didn't want to do that. I want it to fully commit and a while was straddling both worlds.
[00:06:33] And it's amazing just getting out of the straddle phase and fully committing what the growth looks like in 18 months. I mean, our businesses exploded and I just kicked myself thinking, man, this could have happened a few years ago. I think it was done methodically and me being a type, a detailed person, I kind of worked backwards and said, Hey, here's what my salary is.
[00:06:54] Here's what. I would want for fixed income to hap away from that. And then also have some other income streams, like the brokerage, transactional sales, flipping, all that sort of stuff. So if one is slow, the others are hot. And building those pipelines up was definitely the key to making the leap from start to stabilize where I'm at now.
[00:07:13] I love it. I love it. So let's go into where you are now. So you've been doing this for five, for 18. So officially, uh, June of this year was the last day I had a W2 job. I will say I've been working full time. Well, beyond that, and with COVID heading and working remote, I was fortunate to essentially have a salary coming in and still working full time on the side.
[00:07:36] If you will. So officially a couple of months, but on officially, I would say the last two years I've been 110% focus, 50 hours a week, real estate nonstop, all I think about and talk about and my fiance every day. So I'm happy to still be alive right now. That's what it takes. I mean, listen, anybody getting into any industry regardless of its real estate itself.
[00:07:59] It's going to take a lot of work. It's going to take a lot of just sheer energy and push and drive. And if you have to work two jobs at one time, when you're working 50, 60, 80 hours a week, you do whatever it takes to make it and to get that rocket ship launch. Right? Cause it takes a lot of energy to get this thing going.
[00:08:15] Once you have momentum. And you kind of get that engine rolling a little bit, then you can start setting up your system. So let's get into now, like what your business looks like today, about 18 to 24 months as you set it up full time, you have a brokerage company, you have a rental portfolio and you have a fix and flip businesses.
[00:08:34] The way it's encompassed right now. Yup. You got it. So 18 months ago didn't have a Facebook with a business name. Barely had a logo, barely had a name, had a rogue LLC with like a hundred bucks in it. And my business partner and me at the time we had done, I think three flips total, and those flips were like using our own money and 50 50, and putting every expense on Excel and putting receipts in a bucket.
[00:09:00] Fast forward to now we're on track next year. I think we're going to do over 20 flips. We have an amazing lead generation system, have a full-time acquisitions manager with one full-time acquisitions guy under him, two interns and our brokerage. We just signed our 18th agent yesterday. And by the end of the year, we're going to have 25 stabilized bird units with a net profit of 500 to six 50 per door in our portfolio.
[00:09:29] So like you said, when we got a little momentum and really committed to it, step one was kind of funny the order that it happened. Cause even like listening to those stats, like 18 months ago, I would have shaken my head and just said, how does it make sense? Really what we did is huge brand awareness.
[00:09:46] Like the day that COVID hit, we had a conversation, just went all in. It was like, this is either losing everything and staying at work, making a great living or, you know, 10 X in our business and creating everything. So really what we did from the ground up is create an amazing brand, put a ton of money.
[00:10:04] Brand awareness, social media, ads, commercials, all that stuff, and are just real time hitting the inflection point of like starting to growing where we're no longer soliciting people. People are soliciting. OSTI either join our brokerage, bring us deals, get involved in the business. And it's kind of an exciting, realtime thing.
[00:10:25] And it's definitely not easy. I mean, I've worked yesterday. I was in the office, 6:37 AM and got home at 10:00 PM. Like where we live. Right and momentum, you know, excuse me. Bless you. Excuse me. Hey, so let me pick your brain. So when you, when COVID hit, you went all in. Did you go all in, on the real estate brokerage company or the investment cover?
[00:10:45] You're both with. Really just the investment side. So the brokerage is something we had in parallel and it's definitely not as lucrative, not even close to like the other stuff we're doing. It's just a great supplement that we want it to grow in parallel. And now is becoming lucrative. And the thing about it is just the branding.
[00:11:03] So we cross branded my business is Naples home buyers. And then. Brokerages and Naples Realty group shares the same logo and almost just the text is different. So now that we have 18 agents and signs all over town, everyone, if you're not in the business, they don't even know the difference. They're just your Naples, Dom Naples real estate.
[00:11:22] That's like your why. And you want to think of, if you see me are those three things. And then from there we can figure out how to. Got it. I love it. So let's get into, cause you gave me a list of items before we came on camera of some pretty creative shit that you've done and some of your background. So tell us about, your creative financing because you, from what I understand, you've got like a free house pretty much.
[00:11:41] Yeah. So let's pull that one out. I'll let you know. So obviously getting started is the hardest part I got out of college had student loans was making good money. So I saved up a good amount of money. That first first-time home buyer, 3% down is a no brainer. So now got into a deal live in for free their deal too.
[00:12:02] I was thinking, man. Okay. 20, 25% down of a decent turnkey asset is going to be 60, 70 K. If I got to fix it up or stabilize, I mean, you could be almost a hundred thousand dollars in this market to just get into your next two doors. I was really having a hard time with that because the amount of effort it takes to build up that kind of capital based on like my income at the time I had started marketing and was just looking for at the time, my first deal got a lead on someone who had a multi-family they're considering selling.
[00:12:34] Built a little rapport, got some lunch. And they mentioned actually I have like 12 more palaces and I would consider selling all of them at once. So what I did, I was like, didn't put any contracts or anything in front of the guy. So. If you don't even want to work with me, that's fine. But I want to go through your whole portfolio, put it on a spreadsheet, every detail, you know, income, expense, tenants, bedrooms, the whole thing.
[00:12:57] So we have a picture of the portfolio. This is an old school guy, right? There's no computer. There's no like there's a shoe box was the rental property business, a shoe box of leases and cash. And it is just like out of a book. Right. So organize all that. Looked at the numbers, shop a deal around kind of while I was working with.
[00:13:18] And I ended up finding like an end buyer that was willing to take the whole portfolio because it was a great deal. And I had a decision there. Do I lock this up as a real estate agent at the time, just an agent pay 30% of the commission, which would have been like a six-figure commission. It was like a low $2 million deal, pay 30% of that.
[00:13:40] And then essentially another 40% in taxes and be left with like 40 grand. When it really could have been over a hundred. That bothered me a lot too, given that this is like a one-year cycle of courting rapport building, researching the properties, go into them, et cetera. So I proposed instead of doing a traditional deal like that, why don't we add an owner financing element where you hold CEO and the whole thing in cash.
[00:14:04] I'm like find your best property that you have that you'd want at this point, became like a mentor relationship where, you know, we had really spent a lot of time together. He identified his best property, took a hundred grand off. It held a hundred percent paper and we closed the deal with me taking title to that property, discounted at an already discounted rate because it was like package rate on a cost per unit basis and walked away with a stabilized cashflow in property that checked all the boxes year, went by, was able to go to the bank, pull that hundred grand out in a refi, and then.
[00:14:40] Had some ammo to start these businesses and buy additional units. So long story short, it was a long process. And identifying that the properties were owned in cash, he would make more money holding papers, straddling a taxi, or through installment payments. Using that method saved him pain, the actual cash commission, and was able to bring the.
[00:15:01] It gives them a hundred K discount on polio. So every run and, you know, from there that individuals now, like one of our primary, hard money lenders and cash out of the business and want to be in the landlording business anymore and just lends money. And to this day we still text called hangout and it's just been a great relationship.
[00:15:22] That deal took about eight months. All the attorneys told me not to do it. Broker told me not to do it. I took a risk of getting cut out of the deal for the buyer and the seller wanted to just do it. Cause I didn't pay for anything in lieu of trying to put that whole owner financing together. Just one of those things where you got to trust your gut and trust the rapport.
[00:15:41] And I was comfortable, I guess, making a six figure bet to either make zero or that. And here we are paid off. It paid off. That was a great bet for you, dude. It gave you the seed capital to start everything. Congrats. Yeah. I mean, it literally changed my life. And from there, I mean, within one year I went from no units to two great stabilized properties, more money than I started with an opportunity and confidence.
[00:16:05] So it's funny at the time having done like four or five residential single family houses to do. $2 million package deal in this market is like a significant sizeable deal that closed down in the Springfield area. So definitely got me thinking different. And from there it was just, there was no option besides quitting my job and doing this full-time after that, I was like, this is, it takes people a decade to save that like at my work, based on like the nine to five check to check lifestyle, I did it in the swipe of a pen and that was it.
[00:16:34] Okay. So power real estate, baby. So you said earlier that you have a partner in the business. Yep. So explain to the audience, what your partner does, what you do. Like what's your expertise in the business? Because there's a lot of guys that are getting started that want to do partnerships. They don't know how to structure it first.
[00:16:51] And they don't know a lot of people try to go from the same personality, which I think is because you always want to offset your weaknesses with somebody else's strengths. And so it speaks to the audience of what that looks like between you and. Yeah, that's a huge question. So everything I've talked about up until now is just kind of meet up in calming, figuring it out.
[00:17:09] And then after these deals were cognitive, as when I met my business partner, Luke giusto and he, other than that deal is really the one that changed my life and my thinking, because he had been in the space, he went to college, got a business degree, went into real estate full-time right out of the gate.
[00:17:25] So he was, working as a real estate agent high producer doing 40 50 deals a year. I had some other business partners that bought multi-families. So we had met, I think, at a networking event and I was just impressed that there's he's a year younger than me had more units had been into the business and that's kind of where I wanted to go.
[00:17:44] So right away piqued interest and he had network, he knew all the agents, all the brokers, all the lawyers. The whole side of the business. I was technically a real estate agent, but not in the space. I wasn't posting online. I wasn't raising awareness. I was scared of getting hired. So he had the network, he already had experience being a landlord and really what our synergy is, is he runs and he had done a lot of flips.
[00:18:11] So he's running big. I don't even talk to contractors. So he's talking to all the contractors, bidding the jobs or project managers. All that sort of stuff, acquisitions. And we kind of mesh in the middle where now, I mean, I can go to a job. You can go to a job, he'll go to an appointment. I do. But how we separate it is I'm kind of on the backend business development, lead generation acquisitions numbers, guys.
[00:18:35] Uh, deal with the financing with the banks, all that sort of stuff. And then he's really driving the train for all the hands-on boots on the ground management stuff and our whole business model and how we scale this adding value. So everything's construction based. Uh, we're actually in a month closing on our first like turnkey deal.
[00:18:53] We haven't even bought anything turnkey. Everything's add value. Either through leasing evictions, non-paying tenants or condemn houses. So this synergy is that, and he's definitely more of a risk taker than I am. And we kind of met in the middle where he was like, Hey, let's just buy it. And I'm like, Hey, I gotta run 12 spreadsheets.
[00:19:10] So
[00:19:14] marriage, when you have you have, yeah. It's important for me. Cause my first business, when I was younger, I got into the mortgage. And my partner at the time, his personality, my personality were a lot of like, not exact, but both drivers, both type a did not pay attention to detail at all. And when you have two people in that role and you're missing that operation, Person who could actually analyze.
[00:19:38] And who's a stickler for details. Things can go sideways real quick. Yeah. Yeah. I'm definitely the detail freak and he's the higher level thinker. So it's, if you're going to be your ship, you have to have that dynamic. Otherwise you're just, you have a redundant person taking half the profit. Like we rely on each other so heavily for things, and there's such a trust.
[00:19:59] And I mean, our business wouldn't be scaling if I was busy. Auditing bids that he already looked at, or if he was looking at estimating proformer that I prepared and was questioning it. So luckily we're both pretty good at what we do. And there has been little to no situations where we need to like counter anyone's opinion or something, but luckily.
[00:20:21] If we do have like a disagreement, it's just solved with math where it's like, should we buy the deal or not? And it's like, it's not really an opinion thing. It's like whether the numbers saved the numbers or objectives, then it's kind of simple. So there's not a lot of you're right. I'm wrong. I think this it's like this business doesn't work like that.
[00:20:37] It's almost binary, which is what I love about it. Yup. I wasn't sense. Are you guys, so you said you're renovating, do you have your own construction company or are you guys solving everything out to, so we're subbing everything out. We were on the fence about brand people in house, but just being able to eliminate the work comp the liability and really the people part of it.
[00:20:59] So I didn't realize until we scaled what kind of. Bandwidth it takes to have like employees. So the way we look at it, even if the contractor, we can save 20% margin on a rehab, he's got 10 full-time children to deal with. If you will always drama problems, turn over this liability risk. And the way I look at it, we're going to make our money when we buy property.
[00:21:22] Right. When we add value, when we do those things, right. And we'll let the contractors make money. Right. The contractors. So we made that decision earlier that we're not contractors, we're not property managers. Those are lower margin, higher headache businesses. And we want to make our money passively by adding value to assets and then passing them off to our team.
[00:21:42] So right now it's a mindset and we've been working on it. And, you know, we were managing self, managing everything halfway through the year. And then we drew a line in the sand where like tenants should never know. We shouldn't be dealing with this. We shouldn't be getting calls or texts and it's sucking available, still paying your management company 8%, 6%, 10% now.
[00:22:05] So we have a hybrid approach and that's the beauty of our model. So everything that we buy and stabilize, and you're familiar with like the burn method, right by repair refinance there. And, when we do that, we're eliminating. Cap ex basically like everything we've done so far is almost like a full dot.
[00:22:22] So, I mean, there's very little cap, X of tenants move in within one week. We know if there's an issue or not. It's like, did the plumber forget to turn something on? Is there a small leak and no one look, once we get through one or two weeks in a stabilized property, we usually don't hear any. Why that's irrelevant detail, answer this question as we've negotiated small flat fee management rates that are exclusive to that type of asset.
[00:22:44] So if we came to them with something we bought and it had tenants already, and it wasn't Taren, then we're probably going to be in like the five to 6% mark just based on like, you know, lower rents or whatever. What I was saying before is our net profit per door being five to 600 bucks. If you're paying a percentage of 6, 7, 8, 9, 10% of those extremely high rents that were driving, it would cut into our margin a lot where really what we wanted from the property manager was, accounting more than anything.
[00:23:13] So then reconciling accounts dealing with all that and then tenant relations. It was the really biggest. We told them, you know, if we have work orders or anything, just assign it to us as the vendor. And then we'll sub it out to our guys. But we very little of that. So that's kind of where property managers make their money.
[00:23:33] If you have a dog property, that's not that good. And they got to go to court and there's always stuff breaking. They're marketed up and then you're not making any money. What we're doing is different where we utilize property management, but the big elements of like the maintenance and CapEx, where they typically capitalize on, we essentially eliminate before handing it over.
[00:23:51] And we'll source tenants ourselves up front just to kind of set the hook on all that stuff and then pass it along. I love it. I love it. Let's get into talk about, some of the systems you utilizing and how that's helping you scale your business. Just from 18 months ago, we worked with one property to now.
[00:24:07] Yeah, there's a good size brokerage company and this fix and flip company, the rental portfolio. Yeah. That's a great question that we're working through real time. So at the ground up starting phase, you have no systems and you kind of do everything. And it's just been like a real time thing now where we're doing a lot of screen recording going through processes.
[00:24:29] Actually I'll back up before you even get into that, just for the uncertainty and good, our real estate brokerage is essentially 100% automated at this point was a huge deal. And that's why we doubled in size and like the last like two months, because we'd been like putting a priority on it before then it would have been a five agents said, Hey, we want to join.
[00:24:48] That would derail our week with going through the process and go into this state last onboarding and all that. We have some part-time people who are remote, who are just paying hourly, basically come in and train them how to do everything. So they're doing like monthly audits on continued ed stuff, sending reminders to the agents they're doing full onboard now.
[00:25:09] So soup to nuts getting, all their documentation, uploading it, sending it to the correct people, attach it on the correct databases and then managing that process through that. So onboarding pain. And then just like accounting and systems. Those are really the three elements of brokerage and compliance.
[00:25:29] So each one of those buckets we've automated the routine. Yeah. So, I mean, just the systems and automating, just making really detailed schematics and putting the upfront time and to show someone in template and emails and all that stuff it's sucks, but it pays off it's off huge. And it was about. Six to seven months of us, like just doing all that detail because we just opened a brokerage, like just got a broker's license.
[00:25:55] Didn't really know what to do. So that's kinda like my end of stuff. And my past career that was efficiency, compliance, and finance and the engineering world building systems. So that's pretty much what I did. I call them through all the regulation figures. All the deliverables, how to do everything, documented it and then delegated it.
[00:26:14] So now we're able to onboard someone in one day, basically get them live, have it all hooked up, debuted on social media website, built out email signature and everything done. Now we're locked and loaded and we even have, I mean, all the. Pretty awesome. Like spreadsheet for managing splits and caps and commissions in and out and all that stuff.
[00:26:34] So we have someone that comes in, it takes them five minutes to cash the check, go through, update the agent's commission summary, cut them a check, or doing all each X now. So everything's online sync to QuickBooks, reconciled done. You know, those little things took a lot of effort and bandwidth to set up, but now that we've stepped back, it really just validates the whole.
[00:26:54] Delegate automate and elevate. And now it's like talking a loop. We could have 50 agents and it wouldn't affect our day to day. Really the next step would really be, uh, getting a seasoned agent and maybe cutting them in on like a percentage of sales to be the mentor and point of contact. Because right now we're at a mix.
[00:27:13] Half the agents are experienced and they don't like call us and ask us anything. And then the others are green that are trying to get into investing or whatever. So they're asking me how to write an offer for them while I'm out doing stuff. So that would be the last piece that we're at. When we hit the appropriate cashflow in that business, we're going to bring someone in and figure out how to compliment them.
[00:27:33] We'll be hands-off, which is a little bit for that. You do a lot of great things, man. You setting it up the right way from the beginning. It takes a lot of. Yeah, work to get this stuff set up, but you have the mindset for it. Cause you have an engineer background. So, you know, systematizing and orchestrating this whole thing.
[00:27:48] It's like secondhand agent you, right. It sucks. But it's like easy for a guy like you to do it guy like me to try and do that. I'd want to blow my head off. Like it's not my forte. I have to force myself to get in that mindset. So with me and with a lot of other entrepreneurs that they were eliciting, if you don't have the skillset that Dom has, you're going to have to implicitly.
[00:28:08] On your team that has it. But the important aspect of this conversation is you got to do it as early as you possibly can. You don't have to get from the gate from the get-go before you do a deal and start systematizing, get some work, done, get some deals done on the meteor belt, figure out the process.
[00:28:24] And then if you can't document, get somebody who can, because it's literally going to transform and take your company to the next level. Yeah, no. Benefit to doing that. So we had conversations about bringing in consultants or other people that would pretty much do that at whatever the cost is, but my opinion and belief on this I'm being like a prudent operator or a business owner.
[00:28:45] If you will like getting into those. At some point is important because at least now like Luke, and I know there's any point of our business. We can answer a question on the granular level. And obviously the idea is not always be doing that, but I think it's important from the ground up. I could get in our QuickBooks and fix something or figure out what went wrong or quickly look at our monthly P and L and say, this is very out of whack or something like that.
[00:29:10] You know, if you're going to build and scale a business, I think it's really important to understand the fundamentals because you could come in if you're well capitalized, you could come in and really start any business and bring in the right resources. And that's great. But when you're just getting started compounding wealth, like we are now, we started with nothing and every year we're compounding and deployed, you make a couple of wrong moves.
[00:29:30] You could be back to zero. It's different than the venture capitalists come in and just bringing in a players. Cause that's a different game. To fit the theme of this podcast here, the getting started to momentum to the next level. It's really important if you build those systems and understand those systems from the ground up, I mean, you're going to be in good shape.
[00:29:50] Cause I mean, right now at first, the brokerage was a couple of our buddies and it was great. We were saving money and now it's, we're looking at, I mean, this could become, we could have 50 agents in the next 18 months, you know, we could have. Tell me about your, your strategy with this. So is it, I know it's almost one of the same with your logo.
[00:30:06] You went over that in the beginning. What is your brokerage company out there to drive in deals for your investment company? Is it a big lead generator? You got it. So the rest is gravy. A lot of people we have on the team here are involved in investing or want to be investors, or they're not. Either way, like a lot of the younger guys that joined us, we'll feed deals to them.
[00:30:30] If there's something and they want to do work themselves, or there's like a tighter margin or whatever, we have the resources now to feed them a deal, provide them financing, and then relist it through the brokerage and capitalize on everything. I would say high level, our business in general is a lead generation business first and foremost.
[00:30:48] And then when that lead comes in with the brokerage and the fix and flip business and our other resources, no matter what it is, we can make money on it. So if you want to sell your house and it's not a cash deal, it's a nice retail house. We can retail and make 3% on the brokerage side. If it's a dump, we can come in, buy a cash, renovate it, list it, save the margin, and then have exposure on both sides fits in apartment buildings.
[00:31:12] Either source capital syndicated by it with partners, buy it ourselves, whatever. So at the end of the day, the brokerage was critical because it goes both ways. Like we either save margin when we're buying and selling, or we've already had agents say, Hey, this house is kind of messed up. They might want a cash offer.
[00:31:28] Would you buy it? We ended up finding it, give the agent whatever their cost is and then let them realist. It's just, win-wins all around. So poor and peace for us to never let a dollar slip. And that's been important because at first we didn't have this, we'd have real estate agents making money on us and we would be not in control of everything.
[00:31:46] And the control piece is key. So we're the end buyer, if you will, or the end consultant for any deal that comes in above it and tell, well, let's talk, on the last topic here, I'm going to touch on your marketing campaigns. What. Because look we're every business, this investment business, it's really a marketing business first.
[00:32:04] So what are you doing to drive in leads into your business? You can speak on the fix and flip. You can speak on the residential listing company, but what are you doing primarily to drive in business? That's a great question. People ask us at the other day. It literally is just consistency. So we are just consistent in every bucket of lead gen.
[00:32:24] So our social media, we're doing ads. We have a commercial, we're doing all the conventional direct to seller marketing. And what we found is that there's not like one secret. There's not one thing I could tell you right now, and you're going to go do it and get a hundred. The secret, unfortunately, is that you gotta do everything consistently, like six months and get nothing from an ad or a commercial, boom.
[00:32:48] You get something that comes in, we'll fund it for five years, obviously not with like mailers or anything like that, but just consistency and brand awareness and everything works together. Like maybe someone saw an ad and they blew it off and then they saw you on TV. Like, oh, those are the guys from the ad or vice versa or whatever it is.
[00:33:04] So being. Extremely diverse and consistent has yielded better results that fuel both businesses we don't do on the brokerage side, like any advertising exclusive to the brokerage to drive like listing or transactional leads. We're focused on the investment side. And there's so many times that we just get someone motivated, but there's not an angle on the investment side that we capitalize through the brokerage and really kind of how it works is brokerage.
[00:33:33] Agents are their own business. They just affiliate with us. So they're the ones that need to be spending money, advertising, driving your own business. As in, we're not in the business of like promising leads are really doing that. I mean, we're giving everyone way better cuts to the commission and stuff, because we've just eliminated all that everyone's working themselves.
[00:33:52] They know that we have all the best systems that was important that we set everything. Like that. So you can't go to a competitor and tell me that they have better systems than us because they don't, we all have the, either the same or the best stuff. It really just comes down to do they want to work with an up and coming younger, right.
[00:34:09] Minded, brokerage that is fueled by financial freedom and investing in, or do they want to just go list a hundred houses a year? So that's kind of our difference in our culture. Everyone. Most people are trying to do something else. And you know, they like being surrounded by that energy. And it's just been organically growing just from doing what we do.
[00:34:30] So what kind of marketing budget are you putting out a month right now to drive leads over 10 grand a month right now. Kind of across the board and it's been a little spotty where we've actually been a little, a lot more than that, just this summer with, um, some unconventional marketing stuff, just getting marketing us to other key market participants versus just end buyers and trying to be available at the next level and have those resources.
[00:34:56] So that's kind of what we've been doing. And you guys, the ones that are starting on how you set up your marketing campaigns to track what expenses you putting out, purchasing. And how are you quantifying that? Yeah. So that's, I mean, that's a ongoing conversation and I don't want to allude to us having like some secret sauce or anything now.
[00:35:17] I mean, we're still monthly looking at numbers and figuring out what works and what doesn't, but from the ground up, there's things you can do for free and then there's things you could pay for. Right. So like when I first got started, I wasn't like, I didn't have a budget. I was by myself, I was looking for deals.
[00:35:33] I was just grubbing rocks together, basically. So what that looked like. Going on Facebook every day, Facebook market, any rental that's available calling, I'm seeing what's going on talking to landlords, doing that on Craigslist, doing that on Zillow, doing stuff like that. That's literally, probably at the time.
[00:35:49] I mean, that's all I did all day while I was at work. I just had a Bluetooth and it was just doing that like on this. That yielded me more volume, like for no money versus like what we're doing now. I mean, we're spending literally over 10 grand a month to hopefully have a deal funnel three to four deals closing a month.
[00:36:06] That's overwhelming to hear if you're just at the zero mark. So that's kind of why I'm even wanting to get into like the podcast game and stuff. Cause I remember hearing that on like 10 grand a month. I'm like, what is. That doesn't make any sense to me. Like who has that kind of mind going to do that?
[00:36:19] And then I have no money and it's, you don't start there. You know, you start weighing a hundred bucks a month or 500 or a thousand. You got to use yourself, you got to network call a hundred real estate agents. Tell them what you're looking for. Call every landlord that has a for sale sign. Tell them what you're doing sooner than later.
[00:36:35] I mean, if you're a real estate agent, you're going to get a sale out of value, essentially cold. No, I don't know how I'm going to just assume you have three or four buckets that you're pushing out right now to drive leads. Do you have a specific way that you're tracking each one of those buckets where they either call in or go to your website?
[00:36:52] Yes. Yeah. So different phone numbers for everything. That's the easiest way to do it. And then you can drive if people are calling or emailing. So if they fill out a form, I mean, you know where the form came from on our website. So that is what it is, but like our commercial has a different phone number.
[00:37:06] Our. Digital ads have a different one. Our mailers would, and that's how we track the percentages. It's smart. The only way to do business. All right. So listen, we're just about coming to the end. Is there anything you want to add to the orthopedic? Great. By the way, I know you said you only did a couple of these, but you're a natural at the look you've got the content.
[00:37:23] You've got the personality. So is there anything you want to leave the audience with? How could they find you?, the best way to find me is just email or website. I mean, where, if you look up Naples, home buyers or Naples Realty group, any platform, LinkedIn, Instagram. Facebook we're all on there. And then directly is, would be my email address, which is Dom dom@naplesandaples-group.com.
[00:37:49] Oh brother. Listen. It was a pleasure having you on you're a young guy. I can't wait to see your success over the years. If I can serve you in any way, if I can help you out with anything, I'll give you my cell phone. After this show, by all means, keep it stored. I'm a wealth of information. I'll be able to guide you with.
[00:38:04] Awesome. I really appreciate that. Absolutely relevant. Thanks for coming on. And , I'll see everybody in there. .