Easiest Path To Success

Transcript:
Welcome to the Tax Sale Podcast, where tax sale investing is made easy.

I’m Casey Denman, a tax sale veteran, expert, and trainer, author of the tax sale playbook, founder of the tax sale academy and your host here on the tax sale podcast.

Thanks for joining me on today’s podcast, and as always, at the conclusion of this podcast, if you’re looking to learn more about investing in tax defaulted real estate head to taxsaleacademy.com. That’s taxsaleacademy.com.

I’ve got a program in store for you today that truthfully I’m a little hesitant to produce. I really want to lay out the three key steps in getting into the tax sale investment business in as easy of a manner as possible. I want to provide you with the three easiest steps to start. But before I discuss more on this topic I think it’s extremely important to first discuss the vantage point I want you to have.

Tax sale investing requires a certain level of dedication, commitment and effort. There’s a reason that I have an entire academy on this topic. Why I have more than six hundred videos on YouTube about this topic. There’s a lot to this business and well, there’s a lot to any business that’s capable of the financial and sustainable long term results that tax sale investing can provide. So,I want to show you the easiest path today. As discussed, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easy, but this is the path of least resistance.

And I’m going to do it in three simple steps.

The first step, as usual, is to learn what you’re doing. This is the first step, the most important step and the step that will determine whether you succeed or fail. This is a requirement. This is a prerequisite to tax sale success. There are so many different ways to learn of course. Personally, I did it the old fashion way. I’d fail once, maybe twice at one aspect and then that’s how I learned not to do it again. Perhaps it was the time I almost got arrested. Or when I bought a house that has been demolished. Or about 8,000 other times. Made the mistake, lost the money, dealt with the stress and learned from it and tried not to do it again. It’s like the kid that learns fire is hot by burning themselves. Not fun. But it’s one way to learn.

The other way is to find a mentor. Get someone local to train you, let me train you through the academy. Learn from someone who’s already made those mistakes, so you can learn the proper way, avoid mistakes, reduce the learning curve and see success faster. Now I’ve got videos and podcasts on the proper ways to learn so I won’t go into much further detail. But these are the two primary ways to learn.

Now, on this same topic the word learn has different meanings to different people. Learn about this business to me, means that you should learn everything possible about this business. Not just one little section or just enough pieces to really get you in trouble.

I’ll get emails often from new investors who only understand one piece of the puzzle and this is very, very scary to me – it’s a very common approach so many people have to lots of different things today. They take one or two bits of information and then dive in. It’s a classi example of ready, fire, aim.

People will tell me they bought a tax lien but weren’t sure what they do now. Or they’ll ask for help doing there research by telling me they’ve reviewed the property assessors report and ask if that’s good enough. It’s a good enough place to start, but it isn’t good enough to go out and start investing. A lot of new investors will learn more about a city they’re visiting, a hotel they’re staying at or a restaurant they want to try out, then they’ll learn about tax sale investing.

If you truly want to set yourself up for success, you’ll need to learn everything possible about this business. And when we look at the easiest route for success, this is it. This is the golden nugget. If you want difficulties, skip this step. If you want to struggle, to have stress or to make mistakes, skip this step. If you want your journey to tax sale success to be the qualiivent of driving down a bumpy, muddy, narrow dead end road, then skip this step. If you want to make it the euqlivent of driving down a wide, freshly paved road, then make sur eyou learn. That’s by far the #1, top way to make your road to success as easy as possible. Maybe this isn’t what you wanted to hear, but it’s the truth.

Alright, number 2. Slightly more tactical now. Take a look at the lower priced properties. And this might go against conventional wisdom. And yes, I know that I have episodes warning you to not buy only cheap properties, but it’s important to understand context. The easiest road to tax sale success is not through buying the single family home, with a white picket fence, that needs new flooring and paint and will be ready for resale next week. Sure…that’s nice, but let’s be real. That’s what everyone wants. That’s what the competition wants. And some of that competition can afford much, much smaller margins that you probably can. So what I highly suggest you doing is to go after the small stuff . . . initially, at least. I’m talking about the vacant lots, the small homes, the stuff that isn’t exactly what everyone else wants.

Not only will it allow you to get into the action with much less competition, but you’ll be able to do it with much less money tied up and you could potentially even buy multiple properties so that you’re able to hedge all of your investments.

There are a number of different ways you can do this. One is to simply attend tax sales while you’re learning about the business and take note of the lower priced properties. What are they selling for? What’s the competition like? What areas or subdivisions are they in? Answer all of these questions for yourself.

Another way is to take a look at the over the counter or OTC list. And this is a specialized strategy I actually have a five module master class on at OTCClass.com. But in short, you’re able to look at a list of OTC properties, their prices and then choose the best ones.

Once you have either reviewed the OTC list or you have your notes from an auction, it’s time to sit down and determine how much you can make off those properties and the selling approaches you’ll be using to realize those returns. Essentially you’ll be preplanning your investment. Those three words, “Preplanning Your Investment” can certainly be much more difficult than it sounds. But at this point, it’s a matter of connecting the dots. You know what’s available, you know the general prices, you know the areas, then you have a selling strategy, an expectation of expenses, a gross selling price – now it’s a matter of determining if it works for you. If it doesn’t then find another approach, another property, or another area until it does.

When you’re preplanning your investments here’s something I’ve discussed many times before and something I strongly believe in: Speed wins. Every time. Use the approach the will produce a decent return in the fastest amount of time humanly possible. Speed. Get in, get out and move on.

So you have the strategy, now it’s time to swoop in and buy those properties.

The third step is the one the one that really ties it all together. It’s time to execute and expand. After you’ve purchase the property, execute your selling strategy. IF you strategized correctly, then this will truly be easy for you. 100%. Easy. Turning that property into money is the easy part . . . IF you strategized correctly. Everyone always talks about how to sell, how to advertise, market a property, that kind of stuff. And obviously it’s important. But now is not the time to think about htat. The time to think about your exit is prepurchase. This is the time where you’ll find out if you preplanned your purchase correctly. If you did it correctly, it’s easy. If not, it won’t be.

So, execute your strategy. Sell the property, grab those funds and then do it all over again. Maybe it’s the second round of investments or the third round, or whatever, but eventually you’re goal should be to expand. Buy two properties using this same exact strategy. You know it works, so why change it. Then keep growing it until you can buy three proprites using the same exact strategy. And then, AFTER that, if you want to change strategies some then feel free to do so, but be cautious and do so only when you can play with the house’s money or the actual profit you made.

Tax sale investing is a very simple, very easy game once you know all the rules and learn how to strategize properly. It always starts with learning. Always. Learn what you’re doing, then find a low dollar, no competition property that you can resell quickly and make a few bucks on. Then execute that plan, reinvest, do it all over again until you can expand into more expensive properties or different property types.

I’ve got an incredible amount of resources available for you if you’d like to learn these steps in greater detail. There are a bunch of links in the show notes, or just go to google or your favorite podcast platform, type in tax sale academy and you’ll come across some of our free training videos. If you’d like to learn in a much more detailed, organized and comprehensive step by step A to Z manner, just head to tax sale academy.com and become a member of the academy.

I am so grateful for the opportunity to serve and teach you about this life changing business and I am so hopefuly that you found this episode helpful. If so, please just take a few seconds and leave us a positive review on whatever podcast platform your listening to us on.

Take care and make it a successful day.