Just like Jay Conner, Joe Myers loves to share his knowledge on investing that he’s learned over the last 12 years.
He teaches several classes including how to do the bad title deals in NC and a dinner event where he teaches individuals with investment capital or retirement funds how to get a good rate of return safely and securely.
Joe is from Charlotte, NC and he specializes in buying properties with bad titles – whether properties owned by heirs that don’t know what to do with them or properties with liens and judgments where the owner doesn’t think they can sell the property at all.
He works in a lot of communities with abandoned properties like these that no one – neither the owner, the heirs, or the towns or counties – knows what to do with (The County’s typical response is to foreclose on the property for unpaid property taxes and the owner ends up losing the house for nothing.)
At the same time, these communities are facing housing shortages – for both owner occupants and rentals.
This is where Joe steps in – along with his team – he buys the houses with bad titles which help the owners and heirs get money for a property they didn’t think they could sell; he knows how to fix the title issues with his legal team.
Once he has a clear title he borrows money from his private lenders to fund the deal to either resell to owner-occupants who purchase and fix up the properties to live in, his team fixes them up to sell them retail, or he keeps it to rent by the room in partnership with a local nonprofit providing housing for homeless individuals.
All these exit strategies provide housing and improve the community in general. There’s a reason why his email is Joe@CommunityRenew.com
Even though he lives in Charlotte, he works these types of deals all over North Carolina.
Joe has spoken on Uncle Karl & Friends Mastermind & Podcast, Jay Conner’s Private Money Academy, The Metrolina REIA’s SonRisers weekly meeting, Scott Patterson’s Real Estate Investing Trenches, and now on Jay Conner’s podcast.
Timestamps:
0:01 – Get Ready To Be Plugged Into The Money
0:09 – Today’s guest: Joe Myers
2:41 – What Is A Private Lender?
3:38 – What Does Joe Myers’ Business Look Like Before Private Money
5:35 – Why You Should Do Your RE Deals With Private Money
7:29 – Private Money vs. Hard Money
12:23 – How Private Money Will Change Your Business
14:00 – Everybody Has Money Problems
14:38 – Where Can You Find Private Lenders
15:34 – Why I Stopped Doing Investor Open-House
21:17 – How To Encourage Your General Contractor
22:18 – The Rehab House Party
29:53 – Joe Myers’ Lowest Point On His RE Business
32:15 – Joe Myers’ Biggest Lesson Learned
33:44 – Jay’s Free Private Money Guide: https://www.JayConner.com/MoneyGuide
34:53 – Preliminary Title Search
48:25 – Connect with Joe Myers: Joe@CommunityRenew.com
49:27 – Joe Myers’ One Piece of Advice: There Is No Sense In Reinventing The Wheel. Do What Others Have Done To Be Successful.
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The World’s Most Unusual Deal! with Joe Myers & Jay Conner
Jay Conner
00:00:02
Oh, my land’s welcome to another episode of raising private money. I’m Jay Conner with the private money authority. And my guest today has got an amazing story. He’s been a dear friend for a number of years, and I tell ya, in addition to private money, I mean, he’s raised millions in private money. And what’s really, really interesting about my guest is he’s gonna talk about how he has open houses in his rehab projects, invites potential private lenders into the open house, and raises his private money right there on the spot in his open house. Well, even before he got involved in private money for years, he’s been specializing and buying properties with bad titles. Yeah. I named him the doctor of bad titles, right? And so whether the properties are owned by heirs and they just don’t know what to do with him or some of these properties that he specializes in being able to take control of him by they’ve got lanes and judgments.
Jay Conner
00:01:09
And you know, the owner doesn’t think that they can sell the property at all because of these lanes and judgments. He knows how to discount these judgments and make them go away. He also works a lot with abandoned properties and like really turns communities around. He knows how to fix pretty much any title issue that there is, you know, that exists anyway. He’s from Charlotte, North Carolina, and he’s got experience in living in Mexico while running his North Carolina real estate investing business virtually all the way from Mexico. So from private money to bad titles, to abandoned properties, to the gamut of private money. It’s my pleasure. I’m so excited to have right here right now on the show today with me, my friend, and mastermind member, Joe Myers. Hello, Joe. And welcome to the show.
Joe Myers
00:02:10
Hey Jay. Good to be here. Thanks for having me.
Jay Conner
00:02:13
Well, I’m so excited to have you here, Joe, and you’re not in Mexico. You’re in Charlotte today, right? Yeah.
Joe Myers
00:02:21
I’m back here, but the rest of my family’s still in Mexico, I’ll be, be joining. I’ll be coming back here permanently in about two weeks. So
Jay Conner
00:02:31
Glad to have that back. Well, I know you got a ton. I know you got a ton of experience in private money and raising private money. But before we talk about that, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page as to what the definition of private money is. So Joe, what is a private lender?
Joe Myers
00:02:52
A private lender is someone that has investment capital or retirement funds that they’re looking to lend out in real estate deals to get a, get, get a safe and secure rate of return. And I fund, I, I fund the majority of my deals with private money. Actually, I made a list of all the deals I’ve done ever over the past 12 years or so. And about 75% of ’em were funded with private money.
Jay Conner
00:03:19
Nice. Very nice. So are you saying, are you saying that the majority of the deals you’ve done would not have happened without private money?
Joe Myers
00:03:30
Yeah, probably wouldn’t have happened, without having private money.
Jay Conner
00:03:36
So what did, what did Joe Myers’s life and real estate investing business look like prior to private money?
Joe Myers
00:03:51
I didn’t do as many deals that’s for sure, but it’s kind of, as you get into any new venture and especially with real estate investing, you, you go out there and you try and figure it out and you try and figure out how to do things and discover new things and, and, and new strategies and ways to do things. I mean like most people have started start wholesaling then kind of get into rehabs and about probably the end of 2019, my, my business was starting to explode because I had discovered about this, this bad title stuff that it was, you could get into properties for pretty cheap and just take on the title issues and, and take those down. But at the time I had two or three rehabs and I was primarily funding those, I would try and take ’em subject two. If I could, to where, you know, you take over the existing mortgage payment.
Joe Myers
00:04:43
And then I was using my own money on top of that to do the rehab. And if you’re doing like one or two of those, you can kind of make that work. But if you’re doing, like, I think at the, at the hype that was doing like seven or eight rehabs at the same time, and you run outta your own money real quick, quickly doing that. And I had like one or two lenders, but they were like, they, they wanted to charge like really, really high-interest rate. And they also wanted a percentage of the deal. And, and at the end of the day after I pretty much did all the work, I didn’t have much left over to show for it. So I started looking for looking to, to learn how to raise private money. And that’s what brought me back to you, Jay. So since then, I’ve
Jay Conner
00:05:26
I hear you
Joe Myers
00:05:27
Over 2 million. So do the steps and do your program. So that’s definitely,
Jay Conner
00:05:34
So, so what was it that got you in words, what was it that happened that got you to start even looking for private money and got you into private money? I mean, something happened, something shifted.
Joe Myers
00:05:54
I was working with a group of guys. So kind of going back to the bad title stuff at the time this happened two, it was like around 2016, I got into a deal. No, I was, I started doing your pre-foreclosure tracking system in 2016. So I was going down to the courthouse a lot. And I discovered like all this kind of like bad title stuff. So I was bidding on HOA foreclosures and, and second lean foreclosures. And this group of guys that were doing this more creative stuff saw, saw what I was doing. I was kind of an unknown character, in my market at that time. And, you know, they invited me out to launch. We sat down and they essentially headhunted me, to come work with them. So in that group, there’s me, Carl and Mitch was the money guy.
Joe Myers
00:06:47
So, but he was also one of the, he’s kind of a mentor. He’d been doing this for so many years and he, he would be the, be the lender. So I worked with them, did a lot of deals with them, and learned a lot from them. Also contributed quite a bit, to what I had learned in the foreclosure world. But right at the beginning of COVID Mitch decided he wanted to retire. He was kind of done with things and he, he, he thought COVID would go a lot worse for real estate than it ended up doing. So he wasn’t really interested in lending anymore. He, started to get really, really particular about what he would lend on. So I started looking for other lenders. That’s what kind of set me down that path of looking to raise more private money.
Jay Conner
00:07:29
So you’re talking, we’re talking private money, but we’re not talking hard money. What’s the difference between private money and hard money?
Joe Myers
00:07:41
Yeah. In a lot of the forums. And, and, you know, I run a, a Facebook group here in Charlotte, locally that has over 12,000 members on it. And I see people posting all the time that they’re looking for, they’re looking for private money or they’re looking for hard money and they, they get the terms mixed up quite often. Hard money is like, it’s more of an institutional type lender where, you know, if you’re looking for, like, if you’re trying to get a loan on a house and most people, the first thing they think is, oh, I gotta go to the bank. Well, banks won’t lend on the property. That’s not habitable meaning that someone can, can, can move in and live in it right now. And most of the properties we work with are not at all. We have to get in there and we have to do rehab to get them to where they’re livable and nice retail-priced houses.
Joe Myers
00:08:27
So the next thing that people might look for is a hard money lender, which as I said, is an institutional type lender. They, lend on properties that are not habitable that investors buy to fix up to either rent or to sell retail or whatever else they’re gonna do with it. But they’re an institution. They have like set like lending guidelines and application process and all that private money is it’s just a relationship that a, that a real estate investor like myself has with an individual that they have retirement funds in a self-directed IRA, or they have investment capital that they’re, they wanna lend out. It’s a one-on-one relationship. You know, I go out and I teach people how to do this. And, and they come back to me and, and, and want to be a part of my program, my private lending program. So hard money versus private money, hard money is an institutional lender, essentially. And the private lender is a one-on-one relationship where I’m, I’m borrowing money directly from another individual, from the retirement account or their investment capital.
Jay Conner
00:09:37
What do you like about private money versus hard money?
Joe Myers
00:09:43
Everything
Jay Conner
00:09:47
For example.
Joe Myers
00:09:50
I’ve done two hard money loans and it’s, it’s not an enjoyable experience. I don’t care what they promote that they say that they can close. You know, they’re doing the whole gamut. You have to do a big application. You gotta send ’em all your financials. They sometimes check your credit. You do the application, you have to do, they usually do an appraisal. And even when they, even when they give you the loan, they’re, they’re not giving you a hundred percent of the money to like, do the rehab. So they’ll give you probably 80, 90, you might find a hundred percent a purchase price, but when you’re actually going in there to do the rehab, you’re actually spending your own money to the re rehab. And then they’ll reimburse you. What you already spent. Maybe if they determine that you spent too much on a certain thing, they’ll just decide not to give you that money.
Joe Myers
01:10:43
You’re always kind of like on the edge when you’re working with hard, with hard money. Whereas private lenders, you can work out the terms directly with the lender. So the, you know, the terms they’re usually funding purchase plus rehab cost at the beginning. So I go to closing to purchase a property and walk away with the rehab money. I need to, to do the, to do the rehab. So if we need to modify the terms of the agreement, I just it’s as easy as having a phone call or I’ve even done it via text based on what the, what the, how the lender prefers to be communicated with. So, it’s just a lot easier to make things work between me and the lender using private money versus hard money.
Jay Conner
01:11:27
So what I’m hearing you say in the world of private money, the private lender’s funding, all the deal up front, I’m also hearing you say, they’re funding all the rehab front. I’m also hearing you say that perhaps it helps you with cash flow, et cetera. And, and I’ll tell you, I’ve got some, I’ve got some fantastic friends that are in the space of hard money. And here’s what I say. I say, establish as many relationships as you can with people, whether it’s hard money lenders, whether it’s private money lenders. So for years, Joe, you were, you didn’t have any, you didn’t have any hard money. You didn’t have any private money. Any of that. You were, you know, doing terms deals. So my question is, how did it feel when you were actually able to break through and finally realize that private money was the thing you were missing in your business? How did that feel? How did it change your business?
Joe Myers
01:12:45
I mean, my business exploded right around the same time that I started raising money from more than, the one or two people that I had. I mean, prior to 2019, I think I had one non-family member lender. I mean, of course, what you’re looking for, money, the fir the first people you tend to turn to our friends and family, your, your war market as you call it. But once I, you know, started doing the steps to raise more money and ha li have relationships with other private lenders, my business definitely exploded. I actually have raised more money than I can even put into deals right now. So it, it, it’s a, it’s a nice place to be, as opposed to just trying to scramble around and look for money. You get a deal. I mean, most people they’ll get the deal first. And then they’re like, okay, well, how do I fund this? Where I know that you teach, you know, get the money first. And then when you get the deal, it’s like easy to put ’em together. So,
Jay Conner
01:13:46
So are you saying you’d much rather have more money than you can use that have deals under contract and no way to fund them?
Joe Myers
01:13:55
Yeah. I remember Robert Kiyosaki’s quotes. He said everyone has a money problem. Some people don’t have enough money and some people have too much money, but everyone has money problems. So,
Jay Conner
01:14:07
Well, I like the second problem better. How about you?
Joe Myers
01:14:12
Yeah. I mean, whereas, you know, sorry, I lost my train of thought there.
Jay Conner
01:14:23
Well, we were talking about, you know, it’s a good problem to have more money, you know, sitting on the shelf than you can actually use versus having this great deal that you want to fund and, and, and you don’t have any funding for it.
Joe Myers
01:14:34
Yeah, exactly.
Jay Conner
01:14:37
So where do you find these private lenders? Joe
Joe Myers
01:14:44
Friends and family, and, and anyone that’s interested in it. Do your process where you’re not asking for money. You just
Joe Myers
01:14:58
Offer to teach people how to, how to get better rates to return. And there are different ways you, you know, doing a webinar is doing the private lender luncheon, which, which I do at a dinner event, instead of the luncheon, I’ve had much more success with that, getting people to, to come to that because Charlotte’s kind of a big place to be driving across for lunch. And I also do those investor open houses after I complete rehab. I do open house to show off the quality of our work and, and kind of talk about the process and what happened during the rehab.
Jay Conner
01:15:31
Yeah. Well, well, tell us more about that. How, how do you, how do you go about having a successful, you call it an investor open house. What do you mean? What do you mean by that? And how does that work?
Joe Myers
01:15:43
I stop calling at that. People just have a con open house kind of connotation is like, if, if you’re going to open houses, it’s like, people feel like they’re, you’re trying to sell them something and I’m not really trying to sell anyone anything. So when I put together the event pages for those, I stopped calling, ’em an investor open house. I call ’em a rehab house party now, but it’s pretty much, I’m just inviting anyone that’s interested in and seeing what we do. I mean, a lot of people are interested in real estate. I post on Facebook quite a bit, you know, the projects we’re working on and the progress we’re making on, ’em both good and bad. Recently, we had a house that was like literally a week from being done and the HVAC guys forgot to connect the condensation line to the pan.
Joe Myers
01:16:27
And when they turned it on and walked away for, you know, and left it leaked through the ceiling and like destroyed the ceiling. And we had to go back caused a two-week delay in that, that project timeline. But, you know, I posted a lot of stuff and it, it’s one thing for people to see what you’re doing, see pictures of it. So you talk about it. It’s another thing for them to see in person. So that’s kind of the idea behind the rehab house parties. So I just, when, when the project is done, we have a have an event. The house is usually under contract to be sold at that point. We’re in due diligence. The house is still mine to do with what I want, of course. So, so I, you know, invite anyone that’s interested and come see coming to see the house friends and families.
Joe Myers
01:17:12
My current lenders, I invite my contractors because the contractor thing is like, I tell them I’m gonna do that beforehand. So, I mean, I always expect them to do their best work, but if they know that people are gonna like, see their work in person, like other than, you know, the project management team or the buyer, or, or people are interested in buying it, they might be more likely to do a better job for us. So just pretty much invite anyone that’s in, interested in coming and see the house in person. I get a lot of people to come that I don’t get a lot of interaction with in general. I, you know, I invite anyone that’s inserting coming. I put it on my own, my personal Facebook page, and say, if you can see this, you’re welcome to come. I have an odor, I have food and drinks.
Joe Myers
01:17:58
I used to print these 18 by 24 boards. And I had these tripods that I would put around the house that had the, before pictures in them. So they could see the before picture there on the tripod. And they could see the after they’re in person. What I do now for that putting those boards is quite expensive. So what I do now is I always put a TV Mount in the houses, in the rehab houses, and I’ll put a TV there for staging purposes. And then I’ll, and then I’ll put a, like a slide show on the TV showing like before and during pictures and after pictures of the rehab and, and of that particular rehab. So people can see what it looked like before and, and see the difference. And, you know, most of my houses, I think I’m doing a lot more extensive rehab than most investors would.
Joe Myers
01:18:48
I mean, not to say that I wouldn’t like to get the easy rehabs cuz easy rehabs are nice, but I mean, most of our houses we’re tearing ’em down to the studs and rebuilding from scratch. So it’s quite a big difference. But to see that in person, it’s such a huge thing, huge thing. I mean, both the Facebook posts and the, and the, and those parties are to show that I’m real. I really do what I say that I, that I do. You can come and see the quality in person. So, you know, my, you know, I do it as a, as a thank you to my, my team, my contractors, my lenders. I’ve had many of, my current lenders come out to those. And I’ve had people that I’ve never met before in my life that were friends on Facebook somehow come to them.
Joe Myers
01:19:30
And I had this lady recently that she came, she came to two of them and then, I had one in March and I had one last month at another house. And she came to the one in March. And my, my, my mother who is also my account was, was at the event, helping me put on the event, take care of the food and whatnot. And this lady had talked to my mom quite extensively in March. And when she came again last month, she was asking where she was at for that one. But she, she came to the second one again, I didn’t know her from anywhere else. Other than that, she came to the one in March, and afterward, she just came up to me and was like, you know, I, I got some money sitting around, let’s sit down and talk about how to, how to do this. And we scheduled, a one-on-one the next week and we scheduled an hour to talk and we ended up being there for four hours across two different restaurants. So, so I raised another 70,000 from that, you know, that, that series of events. And like I said, she wasn’t even a warm market. She just saw an event page and decided to come to see one of my rehabs. And, and I got a lender out of it.
Jay Conner
02:20:47
So let’s see here, you were with her for four hours, you raised $70,000 after that four-hour visit, that sounds to be something like $17,500 per hour worth of your time. So I guess 17,500 an hour was worth you spending time with her, right?
Joe Myers
02:21:10
Oh yeah. Definitely. I love sitting down with like-minded individuals any, any time, whether they want to be a lender or not. So,
Jay Conner
02:21:17
Right. Now you, you dropped a golden nugget a few minutes ago that I wanna make sure that nobody missed. And you said, you tell your general contractor that you’re gonna be having an open house when this house is finished and it’s ready to be staged, ready to be sold. And you’re gonna be inviting a lot of people to come to the open house. And what kind of effect do you think that has on the general contractor’s job that he does on that house?
Joe Myers
02:21:55
In general? It makes them want to do a better job. I mean, E even though it shouldn’t, it definitely has an effect on, on their psyche. I mean, I tell them that they can come. I can tell ’em. I tell ’em that if they wanna invite any, anyone, from their network to come to see the job that they did on the property, you know, it, it definitely has an effect on them, especially if they’ve come to multiple events.
Jay Conner
02:22:19
Now, when you now, what do you call ’em now? You don’t call ’em investor open houses. You call ’em what
Joe Myers
02:22:24
Rehab house party,
Jay Conner
02:22:26
A rehab.
Joe Myers
02:22:27
It’s more of a party than an open house. I mean, it’s a networking party. It’s essentially what it is.
Jay Conner
02:22:32
Rehab. What’d you call it a rehab. What
Joe Myers
02:22:35
House? Party,
Jay Conner
02:22:36
Rehab, house party. I love that. I mean, who doesn’t like coming to a party? What do you put on, in your social media, your Facebook, your Instagram, you’re whatever, what do you put in the post to get people interested to come
Joe Myers
02:22:54
Oh, to the event? I mean, I put together an event, like a Facebook event page. I, I put like before, before and after I put the after pictures there and I just invite, you know, anyone that what I think might be interested, but then also share that event to my page publicly and invite, you know, anyone that I might come up on their feet. I say, I put in there, like, if you see this, you’re welcome to come. Like you’re, it does not invite only
Jay Conner
02:23:23
Right now, at the rehab house party. What do you do? I mean, you got food, you got a drink, but what happens at the rehab house party?
Joe Myers
02:23:34
So we, I believe this was your idea. We have a registration table. And the reason that they’re registering is that we do a hundred dollars Amazon gift card giveaway about an hour, hour, and a half after the event starts. So they come, they register, come in and my project manager loves these things, cuz he’s just a social butterfly. As he loves, he loves showing off his work for sure. And he’ll talk to anyone. So I have, you know, a lot of my, my team members that are, that are there helping me with the event will also help engage people and get ’em talking. And especially if they don’t know each other and, and whatnot. So people come in, they talk, they probably know other people there meet other investors that, that are in my network. As I said, we’ll have a, a buffet-style table set up in the kitchen. I mean, it’s a working kitchen now, completely rehab. I also have the very first one we did, we did a taco bar. So it was like a full dinner. And then the house was big enough that we bought tables and chairs like folding tables and chairs. I felt like that was a little too much. Like I don’t think people came expecting to eat. So they didn’t really eat that much. I remember you told us not to run out of food and, we certainly did not run outta food. We had like way, way too much.
Jay Conner
02:24:56
You made tacos for a while after the rehab house party.
Joe Myers
02:25:01
Oh yeah, yeah. Me and a bunch of other people too. So, so now it’s more, I, I, I feel like the like sitting down tables are too much if we had if we happen to be staging the house, I mean, that’s, that’s the best thing to have is if someone else is staging the house for you, then you have all the furniture so people can converse and sit down and talk. What I do now is if the house isn’t being staged, I have, I have my open, oh, it’s not an open house anymore. I have my house party equipment out in my shed. So I have every time I do one of these, it’s, it’s funny. I’ll buy something new for it. So the one that I did in March, I bought some, high-top cocktail tables. So people could like, especially in tighter, tighter spaces, people could sit around and still set their drink on something and talk.
Joe Myers
02:25:51
But yeah, there’s food and drinks put drinks in the fridge. We have a beverage bucket, at kid height with non-alcoholic stuff, for kids. I said I have the TV on the wall that has, is playing a slide show of before, before Endur pictures. Cuz it’s, it’s pretty impressive. The changes that we make to these houses since we’re pretty much ripping ’em down or rebuilding from scratch, and then about an hour and 15 minutes into it, I’ll do, I’ll do a speech where it is pretty much just talking about the story with the house, how we bought the story, how we bought it, anything, anything interesting or funny or sad that might have happened at the rehab? We had the one that we did in March like the house was already sold. It was under contract. It was about like, I don’t, I don’t remember if we had passed the final inspection yet or not, but like the house was completely done and someone took it upon themselves to break into the house and try and steal their fridge.
Joe Myers
02:26:51
And they dragged it across our hardwoods to the front door and then they couldn’t get it out and they tried, they dragged it to the back. They couldn’t get it down the hallway to the back door. So like stuff like that, like stuff that really happened. It’s all just to show like I’m real and stuff that really happens. And as you know, all sorts of crazy stuff happens in real estate, you know, good and bad. And so I do a speech and talk about it. What happened with it, all that kind of stuff? I thank my team members, anyone that’s there specifically. I thank them. And I also thank my private lenders and you know, right after that we do the drawing. They’ll usually have someone involved. If there are kids there I’ll have the kids, like the youngest kid, I can find do the drawing, pull, pull a thing out, you know, someone wins a card and then I say, Hey, you’re welcome to hang out and, and network. And you don’t have to leave, buy a specific time and you know, hang out as long as you want. And that, and that’s the time that I get to talk to people.
Jay Conner
02:27:48
There you go. Well, Joe, since you started doing business with private money and raising private money, how much private money have you raised?
Joe Myers
02:27:58
Two and a quarter million,
Jay Conner
02:28:00
Two and a quarter million. And you started doing it what? Less than two years ago, right?
Joe Myers
02:28:06
Yeah. I mean, I went down the path of trying to, raise the money almost a wait. Now, when was it? Beginning of 2020. I, I realized that I needed to, I kind of floundered up about a bit. And then in the summer of 2020, my wife’s cousin came to town and she wanted to go to the beach and like last minute, and we were looking for a place to say, stay like going all up and down the North Carolina coast, looking for a place to stay. And the only place we could find that had was like OSHA front was in more head city, North Carolina. So we went there for the weekend and, I remembered because cuz I had been to your course in 2016 and I remembered that you’re a pretty awesome guy. And I was like, we’re in town. So, I called your office and I said, can I, can I meet J Connor? Can I buy J con lunch and went through a couple of talked to a couple of people and, and then got on the phone with you and you invited us to the Doune club there and we had lunch and you invited us to our, to the thing you were doing in October and me and four other guys came and the rest was history,
Jay Conner
02:29:17
I guess. Yeah. What’s funny is you, you called to invite me for lunch, but I think I took you to lunch.
Joe Myers
02:29:22
Yeah, well,
Jay Conner
02:29:23
But
Joe Myers
02:29:23
We had lunch in the Doune club and I think at the end like you got up to go to the bathroom or something, and I like, I ran to like the bar or something. I was like, let me pay for lunch. And they’re like, only members can pay for lunch. Can’t even so I tried.
Jay Conner
02:29:43
Oh, that’s funny. So look, Joe, I got a question for you that you’re that I know you’re not expecting, but you’ll know the answer. What I wanna know is what was, since you’ve been real estate in, in real estate investing, what was the lowest point in your business? And did you ever think about just giving up and just quitting and going back to some nine to five job?
Joe Myers
03:30:14
I mean my first couple years were kind of slower than I would’ve liked, you know, I started in real estate in January 2011 and you know, literally my son was born December 27th, 2010. And I started like January 1st, 2011, cuz at the time I was in real or I was in the restaurant industry and you know, people that work in hospitality, you know, work a lot of hours work on the weekends, work on holidays and in the evenings. And weren’t really had much of a family nightlife, rich dad, poor dad was the book that kind of opened my eyes to everything. So I left my job and I left and went to do real estate full time. In 2000 May of 2013, it was kind of slow at first. But you know, we, we managed in 2016, I did a deal that it was subject to deal.
Joe Myers
03:31:11
And you know, when you, when you go into any kind of deal or any situation, you always, whether, whether you do the deal or not, you always try and help whoever’s on the other end of it. And not the people you’re trying to help. Don’t always have the best intentions when you go into these situations. And I ended up doing this deal really, really went outta my way to try to help some people. And they were not of the same mindset and ended up, in a lawsuit that ended up lasting over two and a half years and ended up costing me personally over a hundred thousand dollars. So that was definitely the low point. I didn’t really think about giving up. It’s just anyone that’s been in a lawsuit, and you have another option. It’s always better to not go to court. Going to court is not fun. Even if you think you’re right, it’s still not fun.
Jay Conner
03:32:10
I was gonna ask you, what’s the biggest lesson you learned from that experience? If you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently?
Joe Myers
03:32:18
The biggest thing is don’t let the seller stay in the house. That was my biggest thing. The other thing was rushing through the deal, trying to get it done. Like it was like I met the people like three days before it was supposed to go to sale. What I, what I know now about foreclosure is like it, there wasn’t really a hard stop on it. Like we could have still done it without like trying to close on it so quickly. So we rushed through the closing. Didn’t really pay attention to, some red flags and some yellow flags. But the biggest red flag is they like didn’t wanna move out at all. So like the way that I set that deal up is I let them stay there until they found somewhere else to go. And they just conveniently never found anywhere else to go. Even though I found them many, many places they could go, like, I don’t know. There are just people out there that don’t always have the best intentions. I, I call people like that professional victims. Cause they just know how to work the system and, they look for help, but they don’t, they don’t try and help anyone else. So being in litigation is not fun. Not recommended.
Jay Conner
03:33:26
Yeah. I, I always say, and I’ve experienced when you’ve got, when you got a, a bad situation where you’re needing to foreclose or you’re needing to evict, it’s always cheaper to buy ’em out and work with them instead of like, you know, trying to work against them. You know, Joe, we’ve been talking about private money here on the raising money show and I got a gift I want to give everybody I’ve just finished writing my brand new private money guide that will get you on the fast track. The private money is called seven reasons why private money will skyrocket your real estate business and help you build incredible wealth. If you’re a newbie, you’ve never done a real estate deal before you’re a seasoned real estate investor. You’re a wholesaler and you wanna stay in some deals. Private money is the answer and is the quickest and fastest way to fix your cash flow problems.
Jay Conner
03:34:18
If you have any because you always get to bring them a big check. Well, the guide is free. It’s called the private money guide. You can get it for free, just downloaded it at www.JayConner.com/MoneyGuide that’s www.JayConner.com/MoneyGuide. Download that right now and never miss out on a deal because you didn’t have the funding. Joe, before we started the show, you were talking about this deal that you’ve done, that’s just sort of outrageous and out of the ordinary. And I want to hear all the details of this deal. Say, let’s unpack it for us.
Joe Myers
03:35:05
Well, this deal took two and a half years. It’s not my longest deal. I have another deal working on it. That’s four years in counting now, but this was this deal was a foreclosure tracking lead. I took your pre-foreclosure tracking system and I put it into the podium and I’m, and I’m kind of an engineer-minded person. So I wrote some algorithms on top of it. I, I hooked into Zillow API to pull in Zillow data to kind of get valuations on property. And I also wrote an algorithm that would predict the payoff, on the property. So I, with the proof, the foreclosure tracking, you can see what’s being foreclosed on and something I do. That’s a little bit different than the way most people market. I do. What’s called a preliminary title search and in the preliminary title search, what I’m looking for is who own, who owns the property, and what’s owed on it. As you can see here, this is the preliminary title search for this deal. And you know, in the preliminary title search, I’m seeing, you know, who owns it is the owners per deed. Are they alive? Are they deceased in this case? They were deceased. And then I can also see it’s in foreclosure, obviously foreclosure tracking, and then Ooh.
Joe Myers
03:36:39
And in, in the algorithm, can you, can you go back a slide Scott in the, in the, in the, in my leads, foreclosure tracking. So I, I, I know what’s owed on it. I know what the payoff is because I wrote this program, to figure out what the payoff was. And I also know what the value is based on a general Zillow value. I know Zillow values, aren’t a hundred percent accurate, but it’s just a good starting point. And I just pretty much took all the properties and I sorted ’em by how much equity they have. And this was one of the deals that ended up having the most equity when at the time that I searched it at the time that I did this kind of filtering. So one of my mentors that I, that I worked with when I started working with Carla Mitch, Mitch always told me don’t work everything, just figure out what the best leads are, and just go after those really, really hard.
Joe Myers
03:37:35
And that’s pretty much what I was doing here. So sort of by the equity, I saw that it was a state or air situation and there was only one mortgage on it that originated at 35,000. And that’s what was going into foreclosure. So something that, you know, we do, especially with these errors in estate situations is if a property’s in foreclosure, any property, that’s that SIM foreclosure really there’s some sort of distress going on. It could be financial distress, it could be personal relation distress, or it could be, you know, so many different situations, but something’s not working. And especially with the air in an estate situation, typically what’s not working is the errors are not getting along and there maybe don’t have good family relations or, or whatever the case may be. But that was definitely the case with this one.
Joe Myers
03:38:28
Can you skip to two down Scott, please? This particular property had, so it was originally owned by Jerry and Nancy Smith and they were both deceased. And so we start trying to figure out well, who owns the property and who owns the property is the heirs every single time, but who the air just depends on the family situation. There’s, there are so many different things that go into determining the air, and who the air is. I have people reach out to me quite often cuz they know that I’m good at this kind of stuff. And they say, you know, they, they tell me there are no errors and that’s not true. There’s always an error. It just, you gotta keep going down, down the line to figure out who the air is. This particular property had four HES.
Joe Myers
03:39:21
But again, I, I made a big mistake on this property, on, on this deal to begin with in that I didn’t really understand how, how the errors session worked in North Carolina. There’s a statute called the in testate air succession law. And if it is just really complicated who it is, but I made a big mistake on this one. I, I, I just assumed that if the air was already dead already deceased, then they were, they didn’t get a share in the property. And it turns out that they do. So we were thinking that just symphony and Phyllis were the only Hess since the other two, I guess kids of the original owners, were already deceased and that’s not true at all. So what we do is, in one of these air situations, we go to the HES individually and we buy their interest individually.
Joe Myers
04:40:14
And a lot of times it’s a really easy sell. Like, in most situations they don’t think they could sell the property at all. They’re not getting along with their siblings. They don’t know what to do with the property. Their ties work. There might be squads living at the property, run across that situation. Pretty often it’s in foreclosure. Sometimes they don’t even know that they own it or how, how it works in North Carolina. So we go to them individually and we buy their interest individually. So in this deal, we purchased Cynthia’s interest in the property and she told us that she didn’t have a good relationship with her sister Phyllis. And when we talked to Phyllis, we could see why she was, she was not a nice person, but we still try to make it work. Phyllis was not interested in making it work. So at that point, and then the other two errors were de were, were already deceased at the time that we were talking to them. Can you go to the next Scott slide, Scott, please? So we got Cynthia’s interest. I’m working with my partner, Brandon on this deal. So I’m kind of more of the backend research figure this stuff out guy. And he’s like upfront kind of talking, talking to people about this stuff guy. So
Joe Myers
04:41:30
He is one of those siblings that was deceased was not married and didn’t have any kids. And in that case, it goes to their parents. The parents were already deceased. So it goes to the siblings. So the remaining three siblings got that, that other he’s interested. So we thought we owned half of it. We actually owned a third of it. The other areas are not wanting to sell or work with us at all. They said some not nice things to us, which definitely made us think that they didn’t wanna figure it out. They knew about the foreclosure. They didn’t wanna do anything about it. So now we’re sitting there owning a third of this property and we’re like, well, now what we now, what do we do? And this is a question that when I tell people that I do this, they’re like, well, what happens if you can’t get all the interest?
Joe Myers
04:42:17
And this is what you do in, in our case, we had two choices. The property was already in foreclosure. We could just wait till the foreclosure finishes. If when it goes to sell, North Carolina has this thing called an upset period, which means that when it sells at an auction, it’s not really done being sold at auction. It goes into this upset period thing where people can bid on it. So someone else could come in behind the original winner of the auction bid 5% more and put down a deposit. Then it goes into another upset period. And this goes on and on and on. Well, what happens is in these foreclosures was getting foreclosed on, is what’s owed to the bank. But if the property ends up selling for more than what’s owed to the bank and what’s owed to any other creditors, that money goes back to the owners of the property when it was sold, and that’s called excess proceeds.
Joe Myers
04:43:10
So one of our options was just to wait until the foreclosure finishes and then we can get our interest of the excess proceeds. Once it acts eventually sells in the auction. The problem with this particular deal is that COVID happened and the courts were closed. So we originally got the first interest in, I believe in January of 2020, March of 2020, of course, everything, you know, kind of went crazy. And the courts here closed for like 10 months. So we couldn’t get in there at all. And then they would open. It was just like this long period they’d open. And then they, people would get COVID and then they would close again and then they would figure it. Eventually, they figure it out to do all these hearings online. So a lot of the time that this deal took just was just us waiting to get into court. So they pretty much canceled the foreclosure process. They put it on hold. They didn’t cancel, they put it on hold. So we had another option just called a partition sale, which with a partition sale, if you wanna go to the next slide we petition to partition, which is pretty much we’re requesting the court to make a decision about what to do with this property. And it’s just like any other court proceeding.
Joe Myers
04:44:33
You schedule a hearing, you have to, can you go to the next slide, please? You schedule a hearing. You fi you file for it. Anytime there’s a court proceeding where there are unknown errors, or you’re not sure who the errors are, the owners, or anyone involved with the proceeding, the court will report appointing a guardian ad litem, which is an attorney who specializes in figure out who the errors are. So the court appoints a guardian Litem who does a report that says, here’s anyone we know or think may be involved with this proceeding. From there, we schedule a hearing and then we have to serve all the parties, in North Carolina. So we have to serve everyone that is, we know is a he, or we think is an error, or we think may be involved with it. In any case whatsoever, everyone has to be served.
Joe Myers
04:45:25
So in North Carolina, when they do service court service, they go through the sheriff that, so you send it to the county where they live and the sheriff is supposed to serve them with a, with a proceeding like this, as opposed to foreclosures or evictions, they have to be per served personally. So we had two out of like all those people on another list that they, the sheriffs couldn’t find. So we had to hire a process server after the sheriff couldn’t find it, and we had to hire a process server. One of ’em lived in Tennessee up in the mountains. So we had to send someone out there to serve them. And then one of ’em lived in an RV in the backyard of one of the other HES or one of the other. So that person was the hardest person to find.
Jay Conner
04:46:12
I bet. So Joe, well, Joe, for the sake of time, I got two questions. What was the final outcome of this deal? That’s the first question about this deal. What was the final outcome? My second question was, if you knew at the beginning of this deal, what you now know, what would you have done differently? If anything?
Joe Myers
04:46:33
I don’t think we would’ve done anything differently. It’s COVID.
Jay Conner
04:46:36
So what was, so what was the final outcome?
Joe Myers
04:46:38
Scott, can you go to number 12? The final outcome was that it gets, it gets sold at auction, and then everyone gets paid their interest in the property. So you could see our land trust. We got 41,000. We had about 3000 in expenses on it. And, you know, that’s, that was our profit from the deal. We wouldn’t, COVID really messed everything up. If COVID hadn’t happened, or we had done this not around COVID we probably just would’ve let it go to the foreclosure auction and not mess with the partition sale. It ended up being a lot more work than I think we signed up for mostly just making sure the attorney was doing what they’re supposed to do. And there are a lot of delays involved with that. So I can’t, I can’t do anything about COVID so,
Jay Conner
04:47:27
Right. So when a, when a real estate, so you specialize in bad titles, titles, it’s got all kind of funky stuff on ’em. When someone comes across a bad title situation, what do you recommend they do, try to figure it out themselves, hire a real estate attorney or contact you.
Joe Myers
04:47:46
Well, I think, you know, the answer is to contact me. I mean, I asked my, you know, my attorney is very well versed in, in this kind of stuff. I learned a lot of this stuff from him when he was, he just said on Facebook and give free legal advice and talk to me on Facebook messenger for like two years straight. And he, thinks he thought this stuff was really interesting, but most real estate attorneys, real estate attorneys in particular don’t know about this stuff. Don’t know about this creative stuff. We’re, we’re constantly, if, if we have to work with a new attorney based on how the deal is structured, then we’re constantly educating attorneys on, on.
Jay Conner
04:48:20
I was gonna say, you’re, you’re having to educate your own attorneys. So here’s the Bo here’s the bottom line. If you are, if you come across a deal, that’s got the bad title, sticky title, weird title, judgments, lie, deceased errors, all that kinda stuff. Joe Myers is the expert. So Joe, how can people get in contact with you?
Joe Myers
04:48:45
The best way is to email me at the email right there on the screen.
Jay Conner
04:48:49
So the email for you is Joe@CommunityRenew.com. That’s Joe@CommunityRenew.com. Joe, I tell you what, this is fascinating stuff. If nothing else, we now see why a real estate investor would not want to have to deal with all this detail that would drive him crazy. You obviously love it. And so when I run into my next title problem, I’m just reaching out to you and say, Hey, Joe, fix this for me. So Joe’s parting comments, you know, if you had to do it all over again, starting in your real estate, investing business, one piece of advice, you would tell someone starting out that you’ve learned in all these years, what would you do differently?
Joe Myers
04:49:42
Get a good mentor that actually knows what they’re doing. That’s it does. There’s no sense to reinvent the wheel, just do what someone else has done to be successful, to get where you want to be. And, and, but, but also verify that they know what they’re doing. There are a lot of people out there that say that they do or pretend that they do, but just what was it? Ronald Reagan has said trust but verify.
Jay Conner
05:50:09
Exactly, exactly. But you know what I say, from experience, you gonna pay for your education one way or the other. You’re either gonna work with a mentor that knows what they’re doing, or you’re gonna get out there and make a mess out of it yourself. And that’s gonna cost a bunch of money, but Joe, you are the expert in all this title situation. Again, when someone runs across bad sticky titling in, you know, a situation, Joe Myers is the guy, Joe, thank you so much for coming here on raising private money with me and sharing your story.
Joe Myers
05:50:42
Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me on Jay. I appreciate it.
Jay Conner
05:50:45
All right, man. And it’s always a pleasure to be around you. You’re an awesome member of our mastermind group and look forward to getting together again real soon. So thank you, Joe.
Joe Myers
05:50:57
Sounds good. I’ll see you in October.
Jay Conner
05:50:59
All right, there, you have it, folks. In another episode of raising private money, I’m Jay Connor, your private money authority and the host of this show. And look, I need your help. The person that you think would really benefit the most from this show, share this show with them. I really appreciate the likes, the shares, the subscribes, and the five-star reviews. And if you happen to be watching us on YouTube, be sure and click and ring that bell. So you don’t miss any of the upcoming episodes. And we are now on rumbles. If you happen to be watching us on rumble, be sure and follow as well with that. Look forward to seeing you at the next raising private money show. I’m Jay Connor wishing you all the best and here’s to seeing you right here on the next show.
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