While so many people think about investing in real estate Khush is busy wholesaling houses over 2500 miles away!
Long distance real estate investing is easier to do now than ever before.
Watch as Khush talks about the start of her real estate journey and learning how to invest long distance.
Transcript:
Chris Bounds 00:02
So, back. Way back on your first deal, what did that look like? What kind of deal was it? How’d you find it? Let’s start there.
Khush Italia 00:13
Alright, so actually interesting enough, my brother and I, remember back in 2016, I would meet him for dinner once a week and we kind of talk about real estate. He’s like, “Hey, I’m looking to getting into real estate”, and he was interested in possibly doing the flipping side.
And we kind of talked about it, and I said, “Well, how you know.” – We kind of want to do the house hacking thing, which was to buy a property, live in it, and then fix it up. And I said, “Okay, are you doing this for a hobby? or Are you doing this to make money?” You know, and he’s like, “Well, I really wanna use an engineer.”
She’s like, “I kind of really want to figure out how to like, fix stuff”, you know. And so, we kind of started that conversation there. And I think he went to a couple conferences, and decided mailing. And…
Chris Bounds 01:04
Straight mail?
Khush Italia 01:05
I wasn’t working with him. He had kind of started mailing. And I remember the first, you know, the event that I think all of us had gone to was flip hacking live, and with seven figure. And so, at that time, one of our mentors, Andy MacFarlane, had told him, you know, he had gone up to him and said, “Look, I’m mailing in California”. And Andy was like,”You need to not be in California.” It’s just, it’s so competitive.
It’s so expensive to find a deal. And so Khush looked into different markets and ended up finding a suburb of Tampa, which is where we started. And it was just purely out of mail. Finding distressed leads, going through that, sending out mailers, and someone called. And I remember when that deal came, he came to me was like, “I think I found something”, you know, and then like, literally, like, a couple weeks after that, the second deal came in, and he’s like, “Oh, my God, I think we’re onto something”.
He’s like, you want to help with this thing? And I was like, “Yeah, sure.” We both had full time jobs at the time. So I remember, we would wake up like, super early in the morning, because we were in LA, and this was in Florida. So we’d wake up at like, five in the morning, which was like, 8am, Florida time.
And before work, we’d get like, a bunch of calls. Like we’d get leads, and then we call people back. And yeah, I mean, we got our first two deals, you know, within I would say like, three months of just mailing and people calling. And yeah, the rest is history.
Chris Bounds 02:43
And that’s fast. So, what type- so you’re sending direct mail, which is, “Hey, like to buy your house?” I mean, there’s a little bit more to it than that. But basically, we’d like to buy your house get this call. What type of list? Where did you get this list?
Khush Italia 03:00
I think back in the day, everyone just use list source. And I think you could still use list source, you know.
Chris Bounds 03:05
Like an absentee or-
Khush Italia 03:06
Yeah, absentee, distressed, you know. Vacant properties usually, I would say usually absentee owners, it was a hot one. I mean, usually, we were targeting people that were landlords that had multiple properties, people that had owned properties for at least 10 years, people that also had properties, but lived out of state, right? So finding a lot of those properties where, you know, you got an extra property laying around either, you know, it’s completely just sitting vacant, and people need extra cash or it’s possibly distressed because they’ve owned it long enough.
Chris Bounds 03:49
Yeah, yeah. So why you forbade to enter if there’s no tenant in there.
Khush Italia 03:53
Right, exactly. Or, yeah, you’ve got a tenant in there, and you just really don’t want to be a landlord anymore. You know, are you a lot of these people sometimes have had bad experiences with tenants, you know, trashing the place, and all that. And so yeah, those are usually
Chris Bounds 04:07
Did you end up like buying these and flipping them? Or do you wholesale them?
Khush Italia 04:11
Well, interestingly enough, because we weren’t based over there. We actually, Khush It found a realtor who was also on bigger pockets. And so through him as how they got pictures and all that and I think the first two, I would say the first year pretty much in 2017, we would buy them and then we would just list them. We didn’t even we didn’t even wholesale at that time. We would just buy it and listed I mean,
Chris Bounds 04:37
A lot of people call that whole tailing you’re basically putting a you know, a discounted property on the retail market being M at last, which, a lot of times you can squeeze a lot of juice, get a little bit extra for it.
Khush Italia 04:53
Right. The first year 2017. We had four deals, all of them were under 100k. The first property that you know
Chris Bounds 05:02
Like you bought them and you made under 100k? or you bought them for under 100k and?
Khush Italia 05:08
We bought them under 100k and they were- out of four properties, we grossed about 140 something thousand dollars. So each deal was approximately 30 to $40,000.
Chris Bounds 05:22
Not bad.
Khush Italia 05:23
Not bad at all.
Chris Bounds 05:24
Im sure the business within three something months, you know, you’ve got a big chunk of change in the pipeline and I’d imagine that would by percentage make up a decent chunk of what you’re represented your W two income
Khush Italia 05:40
Exactly. And I think that’s where it was like even out of the first two out of the gate, I mean, we the first one we profited 32k the second one profited at 35k. And it was like, man, even if we get a few of these, a couple of these in a year, I mean, we’re going to be able to replace their salaries no question
Chris Bounds 05:58
And have more fun, right?
Khush Italia 05:59
Yeah, of course. I mean, that’s the part of it, right? It’s finding these deals and you know, being able to help people at the end of the day as well. It actually really enjoyable and fulfilling.
Chris Bounds 06:11
So, what are you doing now? Are you still doing- I know you’re wholesaling statewide, you mentioned that. Are you doing the same type like direct mail? Or are you marketing a little differently? Are you still putting stuff on MLS? Are you doing more direct investor?
Khush Italia 06:29
Yeah, so I mean, you know a lot of people say mail doesn’t work. I mean, mail still works. We get a huge chunk of our deals from mail. We’ve also done, you know, PPC, so online. We’re also doing text, texting, reaching out to people through texts through launch control. You know, even Zillow, you can find deals for sale by owners. I mean, it’s all there.
You know, people say, “Oh, it’s it’s such a competitive market right now”, and it is. In Tampa is getting really, really competitive. You know, but at the end of the day, there’s still properties out there, you just need to know how to find it. I think the key is just making offers. You know, I think people don’t make offers enough and they don’t make them as quickly as they should, especially in this time right now.
Chris Bounds 07:20
Yeah, cause if you get a phone call, like one, you got to answer it. If you don’t answer the call in the next person, and then call the next day when that person answers it and like boom, like they get the shot. But you answer it now you get to know what you’re doing, how to make that offer, how to analyze a deal, the final 30 seconds. Any advice for folks either wanting to get started wholesaling or do it virtually? Any thoughts there? And then how can folks get out, get in contact with you?
Khush Italia 07:53
I mean, I would say, you don’t need to create and don’t overcomplicate it, at the end of the day, wholesaling is just simply the term of buying and selling, you know, with it, with a contract in place, like assigning a contract. So I would just say find the deal. Find a deal that makes sense know the comps, know the area, if you need the, you know, get help from a realtor or someone else that’s you know, that you trust, that can run the comps for you. But I would just say, you can do it for free. You can do it for free, you can do in your spare time, just don’t be scared to make offers. I think that’s key, you know, and-
Chris Bounds 08:33
Yeah, like the ones that kind of the golden rule in real estate. If you’re not embarrassed by your offer you’re probably offering too much.
Khush Italia 08:40
Too much, right. Exactly.
Chris Bounds 08:41
First thing they could say is no and you just move on to the next one.
Khush Italia 08:44
You actually want to get a no. You actually want to get a no because that means you know that’s you hit a bottom. So-
Chris Bounds 08:51
Yeah, and that’s where the conversation starts.
Khush Italia 08:54
Right. Right.