Does having a real estate license help investors get an edge?

Omni Casey, along with his wife and kids, owns and operates New Leaf Redevelopers, which is their family real estate investing company. Although they tackle many different types of investment projects, their primary focus has been to purchase vacant and barely habitable properties, fix them up to be the nicest property on the block, then rent them out at affordable rates. Omni has been a real estate investor, broker, and coach for nearly 20 years. His real estate career started in Hawaii where he grew up. Over the last 10+ years, he and his family have lived in Northern Virginia and have been very active in both growing their real estate investment portfolio and growing a top-performing real estate team and office in Loudoun County Virginia. With a passion for building wealth and helping others achieve financial freedom, Omni has coached hundreds of real estate investors, real estate agents, and clients alike to create and execute a plan to grow their real estate business, grow their investment portfolio, or both. Today, we talk about whether it is worth it as an investor to get your real estate license or not. Episode Link: https://www.omnitheinvestorguy.com/ https://www.instagram.com/omnitheinvestorguy/?hl=en https://www.facebook.com/omnitheinvestorguy --- Transcript Before we jump into the episode, here's a quick disclaimer about our content. The Remote Real Estate Investor podcast is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as investment advice. The views, opinions and strategies of both the hosts and the guests are their own and should not be considered as guidance from Roofstock. Make sure to always run your own numbers, make your own independent decisions and seek investment advice from licensed professionals.   Michael: Hey, everyone, before we get started, I want to encourage everyone to actually go share this podcast with one person, you know, we are trying to get the word out there to help all investors all across the country and throughout the world. So if you know someone that is looking to get in investing, please go share this podcast with them and encourage them to the same. It's also really helpful for us if you could leave us a rating or review wherever it is get your podcast. Thanks so much, happy investing.   Hey, everyone, welcome to another episode of the Remote Real Estate Investor. I'm Michael Albaum and today with me I have a returning guest Omni Casey, agent, broker investor entrepreneur, he's gonna be talking to us today about is it worth it as an investor to get your real estate license and vice versa, so let's get into it.   Hey, everyone just wanted to give a quick shout out and encourage everyone before we get started here to go check out the Roofstock Academy at roofstockacademy.com, it is an education program that we talk about all the time on the podcast, we've got different price offering tiers depending on what it is you're looking for. We've got one on one coaching, 50 hours of on demand lectures, Slack channels, private forums and a whole lot more, as well as money back on your marketplace fees if you're transacting in the marketplace. So come check us out rootstockacademy.com. I look forward to seeing you in there, I'm not a cash flow guy. Welcome back to the show, man, thanks for coming on hanging out with me today.   Omni: Like that, thanks for inviting me back, Michael.   Michael: No, of course. So last time, your book hadn't yet come out but you were just sharing with us that now it is available. So before we get to the episode, what is it and where can people find it?   Omni: Excited, so cashflow Breakfast Club, sign up on the back there as well. So it's on Amazon, finally, you know, both eBook and print is available. Actually, we sold out the first week. So if you go on Amazon right now, it might be like a delayed a couple of weeks but you'll get it and we're working through some voice talent right now to do the audiobook. I'm not comfortable doing it myself, so we're hiring somebody out to do that, so hopefully in the next month or so we'll have the audio version as well.   Michael: You should go get Obama to do it. He did and he did that naturally.   Omni: I saw that I think he's a little out of my budget but you know what, maybe on the next book   Michael: On the next book, all right. All right, cool, well, today, I mean, last time we had you on, we were talking about your book and kind of your story and your journey. Today, we're talking about something a little bit different and that's really should people who want to be investors go get the real estate agents license and so would love if you could shed a little bit of light around how you did it and then I got a lot of questions for it because as I've shared with you, my wife's going through the same question, so we're going to talk through it.   Omni: Yeah, absolutely and it's a great question and it's not a simple yes, or a simple no, no, some people go on, absolutely get your license and some people say no, don't do it. You know, back to my original story, I started investing before I was an agent and I got my license fairly soon after, because one, I think I'm a control freak and so it helped me to control the information and the data and the access to speed. You know, and I would say, when I started, there weren't many real estate agents that understood how to help real estate investors rallies, I didn't, I didn't know where to find them and so it allowed me to one, understand that if I wanted a good agent, I need to become a good agent myself. So I went down that path. Now there's a lot more information, so it's not a necessity, because there's a lot of great agents out there that know how to help investors just got to find the right agent to do that and then there's a lot of good information, you know, outside of just from real estate agents as well.   So it's not a necessity, but the when someone comes to me, after they hear my story, and they say, Okay, you're an agent, and you're an investor, that must be it and, and really, you know, my kind of go through processes just kind of tell me like what drives you? What's your motivation because the reality is most people are not built to be real estate agents and so the reality is, it's actually much harder than people think it's a very detailed process of owning a business and if you're not built to own a business and be your own boss, and be a successful boss, right, some people are good employees, but they're terrible bosses and so, if you are not driven to be a really good boss to hold yourself accountable, you're gonna probably not be a successful real estate agent and I usually tell people, get an agent if you become an agent if you plan to use that as your active income if you plan to, whether it's full time or part time, make them money from it, then go for it. But you have to commit the time to becoming successful at that and then if you earning cashflow as an agent helps you become a better investor and have more capital to invest in, it's a win win but if you're only getting your license as one option to, you know, because you're an investor, you think I should have my license, well, why won't why don't you become a contractor? Why don't you become a property manager? Why don't you become so many other things along the way, real estate agent is a very integral part of the process of becoming successful, successful real estate investor, it doesn't necessarily mean that you need to be that. So that's kind of where I start and then it kind of takes us on a very few various tangents from there.   Michael: That makes total sense and I mean, it really gets I love that question. I've never thought to ask someone that because I get asked all the time, like, should I go get my agents license, and I don't have mine and for kind of a specific reason, really, to your point that you mentioned, but it kind of gets to the problem. I think of so many people starting out small businesses like, oh, I don't need that person, I could do it better myself and that sounds like the struggle that you went through of like, I can't find a good agent, I gotta go become the expert. I gotta go do it myself, knowing what you know. Now, are you glad you did that?   Omni: Oh, absolutely. So it turns out I love being an agent. Starting out, I almost had no knowledge of it. Right. So I've been doing this about 20 years now and I had no real knowledge of what a real estate agent does. I had some friends and family that were but it wasn't like on my plan, right? So I was an entrepreneur, and I didn't really look at being an agent as running your own business. It wasn't until I got my license, that I realized it was a really cool business and of itself. So real estate investing, I look at that as a standalone business and then the real estate agent side is as a standalone business as well and so it's no different than if you were to go open up a Subway franchise or some other business, you are the owner and probably the only employee to start, right and so both as the owner and as an employee, do you have the skill sets to run both of those until your business is profitable enough that you can step back and be just an owner? If not, you're always going to be an employee. If we go back to Robert Kiyosaki, it's a Cashflow Quadrant book, right, you have the various quadrants you have the employee, the self-employed, the business and investor quadrants, the self-employed means you own your job, but it's still a job, and you make no money at a job that you don't work at. So I loved it and I became a very successful real estate agent and eventually transitioned into becoming a coach and a broker, have an office about 100 agents right now that I kind of coach and train and so I lucked out, because it became a passion for me. But starting out It by no means I had no goal of becoming a top agent or actually being a successful agent. What I realized now is to be a to really scale your investments at a high level or at a level that were to my ambitions, I needed scalable income and any job out there most jobs are not scalable, meaning I'm going to work and I'm going to make about the same amount no matter what, and maybe there's some performance bonuses in there.   But you're always kind of capped at what you can do, real estate as an agent truly is one of the most scalable incomes you can have and I've leveraged that because I've put deals under contract early on in my investing career that I could not afford, like it was too good to pass up and I just put it under contract and I'm like, I'm gonna buy this no matter what I don't have the money to buy it. I don't know how. So I've got to go find a partner or I've got to go earn income and my highest producing agent, income wise months, were tied to me putting myself in a position that I needed to earn money, and I needed that extra income. So you go out, you can make 5060 $80,000 in a short period of time, because you need it because it turns out, I don't really care about money, and I don't need it and I earn exactly what I need to be at my comfort level and so finding ways to push yourself outside of that comfort level. To need more income was the trick for me to kind of have really high production productions as a real estate agent.   Michael: I love that. There's a I don't know, forget who told the story or of what King or conquer but they talked about, like getting to a beach coming on boats and then burning all the ship because going home is not an option. So you better win the freaking battle because there's no other choice. So I love that putting that I mean really turning the pressure up on yourself intentionally to perform.   Omni: That's great that definitely burned the ships behind you is really what it comes down to and although prior to becoming an agent, I was a you know, business owner, entrepreneur and in sales. So I've always been used to that. But the complete scalable income where you can make zero or you can make $100,000 in a month really depends on how hard you work and the results of your effort, right. It's not just clocking in and feeling like hey, I put in a hard day's work is like no, I need to do things that were actually leading to productivity leading to contracts and sales and so you can, you can be as successful as you're motivated to be.   Michael: I think that's, that's such a good point that I kind of want to spotlight on as an employee, you show up and get paid, kind of independent of what you do. I'm not saying you can't get fired, right? There's performance stuff, but like, all you have to do is kind of show up and do the bare minimum and you'll get by, versus as an entrepreneur, as a business owner. If you don't do the things that are getting results that are actually moving the needle, you probably aren't getting paid.   Omni: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely and so, so back to the original question, right of should I get my license? If I'm a real estate investor or want to be a real estate investor? It's yes, if you're going to use it as active income, and it's maybe if you're going to do if you're going to use it as so. So most people think I'm going to get my license to save commissions on my deal, right? Like, I'm licensed in five states. I don't earn commissions on my deals, because I make sure everyone else my I hire agents still because one, I don't have the time to do that anymore myself starting out. Sure, I was involved in some deals but actually getting your license to just save on commissions could backfire on your success because starting out, I said, oh, that's cool. I'm going to make money on every deal that I do and other agents knew that I was an investor. Other agents saw me as alright, well, if I send someone to this guy or tell them about a lead, they don't have an opportunity to make Commission's because I was going to be making the commission. So it wasn't until I figured out I tell everyone, I want to pay you well, I even though I'm an agent, I want you as an agent to get paid on this and I started telling everyone agents and wholesalers that I will pay you extremely well, if you bring me an off market deal. That made it easy for them to bring me off market deals, because now I wasn't they weren't worried about me cutting them out of some sort of potential listing fee or biography down the road.   Michael: That's such a great point. I'm going to two statements that I'm going to make and I want you to evaluate which one you think is more true. Investors make great agents, or real estate agents make great investors.   Omni: Oh, man, both are false 100%. I love the way you frame both of that. So I will say investors make great agents. Some investors, it takes a certain mindset, right. So from a real estate agent standpoint, or I guess you can pull out from a business owner standpoint, you really need a visionary and an integrator and kind of goes back to that book. I was at rocket fuel. No, there's, there's another one.   Michael: Is it a traction?   Omni: Traction? Yes, traction. Thank you.   Michael: I haven't read it. But someone just mentioned that in the course…   Omni: Traction and rocket fuel, both by Gino Wickman talks about the visionary and integrator and most people starting out, you're just one person, and you got to figure out how to be both. But really, there are different, you know, mindsets altogether and so from an investor's standpoint, you will reach your limit as either an integrator or visionary unless you start to build the team or hire beyond that and as a real estate agent, as well, a visionary, usually those are the ones that like had the big vision, they're usually you know, out and social and they're kind of building, you know, ideas and kind of getting people excited. But then the details fall through the cracks and they don't have the ability to actually execute on their plan. They get people to say, yeah, help me buy help me sell, but they don't have the details in place to do them. So it's actually easier to be a visionary and hire out from for administrative purposes, from the integrator standpoint, than being an integrator and hiring out on the visionary standpoint. But once again, those are just roles and we all play both roles until we get big enough to go beyond that. So from the investor standpoint, most are visionaries, most are absolutely visionaries, but you get to the point where you don't have the details in place or maybe you don't even value the details of what the real estate agent does and the investors that have been investing for a very long time, especially at a high level, getting into real estate, they're saying I don't understand the purpose, I don't understand why we're talking about, like this $5,000 commission or this one little transaction. So it's hard for them to bring them into the moment as a successful investor. From a from a real estate agent standpoint, unfortunately, most real estate agents actually get into the business and unless they connect with an investor or investor broker like myself, they actually look at real estate investors as like, like, I don't want to deal with you like the worst clients in the world, right? So there's almost as friction between the two was spoken or unspoken and really, it's only the agents that get in with the mindset of I think I want to do both, or the investors that get in the mindset that I think I want to do both you're almost ruining yourself from jumping over to the other side. Once you're established as an agent, or as an investor, it's very tough to cross over from what I've seen.   Michael: Interesting. Okay and why do you think some agents don't like working with investors because objectively A, I would want to work with me humblebrag. But like, it seems like we're so much more fact driven and numbers driven, as opposed to an owner occupant. You know, I don't like the paint color. I don't want this house. Like, I don't care about the paint. If the numbers make sense, great. It's a go for me. So why do you think that is?   Omni: So I think, just like any industry, the inexperienced investors and the, the, the investors that I've never invested before, give everyone else a bad name, right because they're all about one, they don't have the money to actually hire somebody and pay for the services. So they're trying to use and abuse as many people as possible, because that's what they were taught to do, and pay nothing for it and make no commitments, right. No, I'm not going to sign an agreement with you and so, so they are one, the least committal group out there. They are the cheapest group, they're always trying to, you know, Beat Agents down for their commissions and their fees and things like that and so I'm not saying that's everyone I'm saying, if I'm a terrible investor, and don't know how to find or put under contract deals with good margins, that I might be pressured to make sure I'm paying nobody along the way, right, because I'm making only make a little bit of money, you can't make money, I can't have my agent make more money than I'm making on the deal, right. So that's the, the beginner or the novice investor mindset, where I think Robert Kiyosaki is the one that kind of ingrained in me and many people that you pay, your vendors will pay your broker as well and the more I decide to pay, like, if the going rate for a commission is 3%, I'm paying 4%, I pay above market rate, because I want everyone to see me as a more profitable venture for them to actually take them down the path of getting a deal sold and so, you know, the margins need to make sense, but I just don't buy the deal. If I can't pay my brokers, pay my agents pay my contract as well, and get a good deal because that relationship is far more valuable than that one deal. I need to make sure that that agent, or that wholesaler, or that contract, or whatever it wants to do business with me over and over and over again and they put me at the top of the line, when there's all these other newer investors out there are newer agents that want to work with them. Hopefully, they're thinking about me first.   Michael: That is a great point, that's a great point. I'm not I feel like everybody and their brother and sister are real estate agents. We all know someone, we may even have some in our family, how can you get in the business and separate yourself and what seems like already a pretty saturated market, if you decide that's the route for you, getting your license, make sure.   Omni: So my wife is not licensed and she helps me on the investment side and like every other year, she's like, maybe I should get my license, maybe I should get my license. I'm like, you would be a terrible agent, right. So and I love my wife. She's amazing at what she does. But I know what she would not be willing to do, right and so to set yourself apart, you need to establish that you're different or you need to establish some sort of differentiator, right and if not, then to be a successful agent, it's okay, well, can I be the cheapest and the reality is there's so many cheap agents out there that are willing to reduce what their cost of services are. But it also reduces the quality of service and just like that gives investors a bad name to agents, right. I only deal with investors that never buy properties, or that do want me to make 1000 offers before they actually put in a reasonable offer, right. Same thing on the, in the real estate industry. There are many real estate agents that got their license, because one, it's easy to get your license, and there's such a low barrier of entry and they really didn't, they just they just said, Alright, I'm going to do this as a hobby, maybe not as a business and so because of that, for them to be competitive, they got to be make themselves at a lower rate, but they can't afford to offer the same level of service and so from an investor standpoint, you're like, I hired the worst agent in the world, that agent wouldn't return my calls, didn't know what he was doing wasn't educated. Well, that's what you want it right. You wanted the cheapest agent out there, and you get what you pay for. So it is a self-fulfilling prophecy in terms of who you end up with but someone just getting in and getting their license, it comes to education. So I think I bounced around from a few different brokerages throughout my career and it wasn't until I found like a mentor and someone that was willing to kind of take me under my wing and say, okay, you got potential, but you're all over the place. Do you need to kind of stay organized and put a plan in place. I don't think I would have made it right, I needed that direction. So having the coaches the mentors and the masterminds that I relied on the investing side, same thing on the real estate agent side, also the essential and I'm although I'm a visionary to start, I do get very analytic Call and so I try to calculate the ROI of everything right, the ROI of my dollars is easy to track. But the ROI of my time now, you're telling me I need to go sit at an open house on the weekend. And you know, I'm talking to people, but what's my ROI on that, right.   That's three hours or four hours or five hours, I'm sending out postcards, what's my ROI on building a business and so you know, I got really good at tracking everything I did from the beginning, and actually writing down the results over a period of time off, alright, if I did an open house, and I made on average $10,000, let's just say every time I sold a home, and it took me five open houses to sell one home, I got to figure out what my ROI was, right. So every time I did an open house, I made $2,000, or you know, something along those lines. Turns out, I was really good at drinking coffee. So that became like, my number one business generator was meeting people drinking coffee with them connecting with them on a one on one basis at our favorite coffee shop in Hawaii and then it's not, Hi, I'm an agent, I want to sell you real estate, it really is sitting down with them and you know them somehow they might be a relative, they might be a friend, you might barely know them from social media, wherever your relationship is here. You're just trying to take your relationship to there and it's not whether or not that person in front of you, buys or sells with you, which is the end goal for most real estate agents, it really comes down to, is that person in front of you? Do they like you? Do they trust you and would they actually refer their family and friends to you, because there's no guarantee they'll actually ever buy in the next 10 years, right? You're building this relationship for something that might not turn into a transaction but if they are saying, hey, I like this guy and at some point, I'm going to hear about someone that needs a good agent. I'm gonna feel good referring Omni as my agent, that became it. So I realized that I can build those relationships, one on one, at my favorite coffee shop back to back, you know, sometimes I would sit down and have two or three meetings back to back of just having coffee, sometimes breakfast with people and just building the relationship that eventually turned into referrals.   Michael: That's great. Sounds like you're very caffeinated for quite some time and you're very caffeinated…   Omni: Very caffeinated. I switched to decaf, decaf, usually around the third person but the ROI at some point got to like $6,000 per coffee meeting, right. So I figured out what my average commission was and how many coffee meetings I needed to get to enough referrals to get the clothes that I was making about $6,000 for a 45 minute coffee meeting, I was motivated to have a lot of coffee meetings. Yeah and from a broker coach standpoint, I go to the same organization with every one of my agents, I say, okay, how do you figure out your ROI and what you're good at everyone's good at something different but once you know, what you're making per activity, how do you motivate yourself to continue to do that activity and that's really the key, like, keep yourself motivated?   Michael: Yeah, no, that's so good. That's so good. I think we could do the exact same thing from the investor side is like, okay, what how, you know, how are you networking? What is the activity you're doing and what is the ROI. That's great man, absolutely curious to get your thoughts, because you've been on both sides of the coin, like, what should investors be doing to a, like, be good to work with to be a good investment be a good client for their agents but also, how do they go find a good investor friendly agent and how can you kind of, you know, how do you break up with a bad one?   Omni: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think there's a lot of online forums now, with investor friendly agents or agents that are at least advertising as investor friendly. No, I think it'd be hard for me to work with an agent that is investor friendly, but doesn't invest themselves, right. So, so it's a simple conversation, like, what are they doing? Are they actually investing in not to say it's required, but at the level that I need right now, of the amount of transactions I do in the advisor, I'd love if my agent could actually be an advisor, right, so I think I understand the investment standpoint, but they should know that the market specifics, they should know how that ties into that specific geographic region that I might not be familiar with and I want them to walk me through and have this kind of mastermind kind of effect of us both thinking through and, and if they have not, kind of done their own investments, it makes it harder now, we'll say for our brand new investor, and investor friendly agent that has not invested I think it's okay, because they're learning the knowledge there.   But yeah, I think I when I asked him, how, what kind of investments do they do, and if I'm focusing on doing a burr in a particular area, that usually means that they need to know you know, how to be a landlord how to fix and flip you know, how to get contractor quotes and things like that, to give me some guidance of what the cost structure for that type of project in that area would be and where do you where do we find them? It's through referrals. So from an investor's standpoint, you know, various meetups, there's a lot of online meetups now but if you can connect with online meetups, various podcasts like this, you know, people make recommendations per area and what's interesting people go to an area and they, they are usually gonna go through one of one of two, they're like, I want to find the best agent in the area, the top agent, guess what the top agent doesn't want to work with us, they don't have time to work with an investor looking to buy a $200,000 property, right, because they've gotten to a level. So they're not to say they couldn't help you, they just don't want to help you right now, unless they have a team of people, they're gonna hand up the truth, they're gonna go the right, the other route of I'm gonna go with a brand new agent that has nothing else to do. So they're going to do everything that I want, and they're going to do it at a, at a very affordable rate. Once again, now you are just coaching, and you don't get the benefit of someone with expertise. So usually, it's somewhere in between someone that's a successful agent, not a top agent, but also an investor as well and if you get stuck with somebody that is not meeting your criteria, one, it usually comes down to one or two things, one, they don't know how to help you, maybe they don't even want to help you because they didn't know what they're gonna get into, or the communication, expectations or not and so I think getting really good at setting your communications upfront, before you agree to work with them. If you're really good at setting your communications, people will, some people will not actually want to work with you, not because of you, but they're gonna say, okay, I need to be at a certain level of understanding and expertise to meet his expectations. I don't think I can meet that. But guess what this agent I think might be the right fit for you and maybe you might get a recommendation from there, but lay down exactly what you, you know, what you would like to see from the relationship and they have to see that it's mutually beneficial. So whenever I go into a new market, I rarely go in with the intent of buying one property, I usually go into the intent of establishing a market and if I can build the right team, I'm gonna buy a lot of properties in that area and whether I'm talking to a in real estate agent or a property manager, I tell them that I want to become your number one client, that's my goal, there's no guarantee I will, it will be based on whether or not this relationship continues at work and I find deals that are profitable, and you help me find those deals. But if so, I will continue to invest around you and so I invest around good agents and good property managers, more so than specific locations. There's great locations out there that I own one or two properties in, I just have not continued to buy there. Because I don't love the team that I have yet, you know. So it's, it's I just have not found the right team to give me the confidence to scale up to 30, 40, 50 properties in one area around someone that maybe I'm not fully happy with in terms of communication or results.   Michael: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense and I talked about with folks on the podcast and in the Roofstock Academy all the time about just that, like, do you go deep into a market or do you go wide across multiple, and I think when you go wide, you get exposure to a lot of different markets, you can you can decide, hey, market A was great market beat, maybe not so much. See, we're gonna pass entirely, but you wouldn't have seen market A;B;C if you're only in market a so and that makes a ton of sense and then so from on the investor side, like what should we be doing. Other than setting very clear expectations around communication to be to make agents want to work with us. I mean, we want to, of course, be the number one client for those agents but what can we be doing skill wise or communication wise or pitch wise to make ourselves as attractive as possible for agents to fight over us so to speak?   Omni: Yeah, I love that and I think, even today, when I go into a new market, I still, like come in with when I'm interviewing agents, but I really want them to be interviewing me as well and I really want to show up as a as a good and desirable client and, and so I do want to make it as easy as possible for them. So I will do a little bit more backend research on my end. If I know I have access to the data, rather than making my agent go do some, you know, meaningless task or some task that they might not fully understand yet. I'll do that until we kind of are on the same page and reach almost partnership level, right. So I do try to make it easy. If I just go in and say okay, here's a list of everything that I need right now and guess what we're going to make 30 offers and none of them might get will probably not get accepted, but that's my average or whatever the case may be. They're probably not going to like working with me or want to work with me. So I set the expectations up front of here's what we're going to get to, but I also if there's something that I can do, or some like my virtual assistants, someone on my team can take care of, I'll take that off of the agents play and really only use them for the essential things that I don't have access to or I don't like they're my boots on the ground. They are my local knowledge and those are the two things and sources to sources to other contractors, sources to wholesalers. But those are the things that my agents really bring to the table and I want to make sure that anything outside of that if I can take care of it myself, I'm going to take care of it myself or have someone on my team take care of it.   Michael: So even though they might be a Jack or Jill, of all trades we shouldn't be using and abusing them as a Swiss army knife.   Omni: Yeah, until they volunteer to be abused, or until they say, you are my number one client, and we bought 10 properties together, what can I do to help you buy 10 more. Sure, but if you're still trying to buy your first or second property, I mean, how many of those type of investors has every real estate agent worked with a lot. The reality is, there's always a little bit of skepticism until they get to that first one or two transactions, then it's like, okay, this is real. He's one of the good investors and not one of the investors that don't know what they're doing. So I think it's prove yourself both sides are proving yourself through till you get to your first few transactions.   Michael: That makes total sense. I met a question that I have for you, and you're gonna have to kind of wear both hats, if you could. So as an investor, I'm sure I would actually ask you, have you ever made an offer, like a ridiculous offer. You're like, there's no way this gets accepted and it does?   Omni: Yes, all the time, all the time, so…   Michael: I have to, and I've had agents tell me, that's probably not going to get accepted and I push them I say, do it anyway. Now, you mentioned that as an agent, working with clients, like throwing out ridiculous offers, and you feel like it's a waste of time for the agent. So how do you square those two. I mean, how can you know what I mean?   Omni: Yeah, and I can see absolutely both sides and I do take off and put on hats all the time, as you mentioned, right. So whenever I do training, I gotta explain like, okay, I have my broker head on right now and then sometimes I'm like, no, I'm not a broker right now, I'm putting my investor hat on. So it is a different perspective. I think understanding the perspective on the other side is definitely helpful. Me personally, when I put in offers, I usually, for a very long time, I've usually done in three offers strategy. So I usually put in three offers at the same time to the same client, and it is varying strengths of offers and it usually has some sort of component. So there might be an all cash offer, there might be a traditional lending offer, that's a little bit all cash is going to be the lowest price the seller needs to sell today, it's going to be the lowest price and traditional lending offer is going to be at 95% of value, or whatever it is and I might go 100% or 105% of market value if they're willing to do seller financing, right and so you're kind of laying out these, you're educating your agent at the same time, if they're not familiar with that. And you give I give my agent, my agent, the exact wording the exact template, so they're not having to figure out, what do I do here, I say, here's the wording, here's what you sent to them, here's the attendance for the offers and we're gonna give them three options to choose from and so although it is more explanation on their part, it really is some coaching that I take on if it's a new agent of here's what I want you to say, here's what I want you to do and they usually see that as really good education of how they can better serve other investors moving forward.   But rarely do I just put in an offer of alright, they want $500,000, let's say 200,000, you know, so it's just that just not me, I usually give multiple options there and they're comfortable doing that not to say, you can't do that, I think you just need to set the right expectations with that agent of alright, we are going to be putting in 50 offers at ridiculous prices and then if they're okay with that, great, they build a template and hopefully it takes them two minutes to get the paperwork ready for you because it's already pre built but if they're having to like struggle through and spend, sometimes upwards of a few hours prepping offer paperwork, people don't understand, like it could take several hours prepping that paperwork and reviewing it. That's probably not worth it to submit 30 offers for the chance of one going through, you know, if they, if they figured out their ROI on that activity, it'd be like less than minimum wage. So I think it's setting the right expectations, making sure they're okay with that but my strategy is that three offers strategy that gives them at least a better chance of having a conversation with that listing agent or seller that might turn into something.   Michael: Yeah, it's funny, I actually do the same thing that three offers strategy, and I just made a YouTube video talking all about it. So I think it's great. It gives folks the choice of which of your offers am I going to choose as opposed to yes, no accept or reject.   Omni: Absolutely, I don't want to sell everything in between yes and no, I want them to be thinking between option one, two and three and it works at a much higher rate than people think.   Michael: I love it, I love it, Omni this was so much fun, man really insightful for people that want to continue the conversation and learn more about you reach out to you directly where's the best place to do so?   Omni: Yeah, I'm on social media Omni the investor guy Facebook, Instagram and actually on Tik Tok now no dancing yet but I'm getting there soon and then I'm on https://www.omnitheinvestorguy.com/ is my website you can get information on the booking see my story you can send me messages there as well.   Michael: Awesome. Well, hey, thanks again man and I'm sure we'll be chatting soon.   Omni: Always a pleasure, thanks.   Michael: Take care. All right, everyone. That was our episode a big thank you to all my for coming back on the show, super, super interesting stuff. Definitely have a lot to think about and hopefully you do too as an investor or as an agent, kind of walking on the other side of the coin. So as always, if you'd like the episode, please feel free to leave us a rating or review and we look forward to seeing on the next one. Happy investing…