Real Estate Cold Calling: The Toughest Part of Winning the Real Estate Game

I grew up in Pennsylvania, Scranton, P.A. I came from a middle class blue collar background, basically taught myself financial management and financial investing after I left the military. So I got into the sales business and moved down to Philadelphia and then that's when I started learning about real estate. I got in to learning about buying single family houses and the different nuances that go along with just getting started with small scale real estate. But as I continued learning and educating myself, meeting new folks and getting an understanding of the broader range of opportunity that's out there I ended up running into my current partner. He was in the same boat. He was investing in single family houses and looking for a way to scale. He wanted to be more hands off or not hands off, but be able to scale and see the thing about it was we had people. He had people. I had people that liked investing in single family houses. They liked the benefits of real estate, the tax shelter, real estate. But they didn't understand how to do it. They wanted they knew we were investing in real estate, so they wanted to be a part of it. So that's kind of what launched the idea of starting our first syndication fund. But then Percy and I partnered up. The first property we bought was one hundred and twenty four units.

In a sense, I'm proud of the way I grew up, even though it's what it probably wasn't the ideal way, because, like you said, it does teach you different lessons that you don't get to experience when you have sufficient upbringing. Sometimes you're sheltered from certain experiences and certain scenarios that, it wouldn't be ideal for your child to live through or to deal with, but if you do, if you have to end up experiencing certain things or certain hardships, I think, it prepares you for for different situations in business and life in general. So, yeah, I think definitely, where I came from, it was not outside of the normal everyday activity for, to be in a fight in the school, at school, it was like the. You'd see, like, I don't know, people parked in their front yards. You ever go through a town, you see people's like pickup truck is in the front yard. You're in like the rough part of town or the redneck town. That's kind of what it was like.

So, I don't think I would ever take my colleagues back to my home town for a for a closing dinner. But I think that it definitely it definitely gives you an edge. It gives you an edge because you have. I have more I feel like sense of urgency that might not be present in somebody who isn't, hasn't had to been in a situation where it was, win or lose such a black and white. It's options, too. So, yeah, I think it gives you an edge. I think it helps you see things a little bit more clarity gives you a little bit more. It definitely gives you a thicker skin, especially when you deal with cold calls. You know what I'm talking about with cold calls. Any cold calling is probably one of the top ten most difficult jobs. I don't know if Mike Rowe, who is that guy? Mike Rowe, the guy who did that job show. Dirty Jobs. He should have done an episode on cold calling, because that is like not it's not physically demanding, of course, but it is mentally excruciating, because it's just not natural to deal with continuous and constant rejection, but if you can do if you can deal with it and learn to deal with it, it really gives you an advantage going forward, especially if you learn, different tricks and different ways to appeal to people so that you get them cold. But you appeal to them in a way that, like at first they hate you but you say a couple things. Words like, they give you the time of day. You start to develop that almost out of necessity.