Brett Snodgrass is CEO of Simple Wholesaling and has been a full-time real estate investor for 10+ years. He specializes in wholesaling, wholetailing, creative financing, and scaling a business from a one-man band to an amazing full team running 100s of deals per year.
Brett has extensive knowledge and firsthand experience in several facets of real estate investing. He is an investor in Indianapolis (who loves being a Hoosier) and works with investors all over the country who want to invest in one of the top-rated cash-flowing markets in the nation—that being Indy.
Brett’s amazing team buys and sells 300+ properties per year and builds passive streams of income by creating 50+ creative financing deals per year. In a five-year timespan, Brett has gone from a one-person team to a full-time staff of 10+ team members and has tripled his deal flow.
As a man of faith and a real estate investor, Brett combines both to bring opportunities to everyone he encounters while spreading the kingdom of God. This is his mission and the purpose behind his company Simple Wholesaling. He has a passion for helping others in business and personal growth.
Brett also enjoys spending time with his wife Karen and his four young children, in addition to taking mission trips and serving others through his faith.
Timestamps:
0:01 – Introduction
0:29 – Jay’s New Book: “Where To Get The Money Now” – https://www.JayConner.com/Book
2:09 – Today’s guest: Brett Snodgrass
6:38 – Brett, Real Estate & Simple Wholesaling
9:12 – Wholesaling vs. Wholetaling
11:42 – How do you find deals?
13:18 – Driving For Dollars
15:57 – Jay Conner’s Bird Dog
17:38 – What is your best exit strategy?
20:13 – Formula for the maximum amount to put a house under contract.
22:56 – Connect with Brett Snodgrass: https://www.SimpleWholesaling.com
23:28 – Brett Snodgrass’ Podcast
24:25 – Balancing Family, Life and Business
30:10 – Best piece of advice from Brett Snodgrass
32:10 – “The Precious Present”
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Jay Conner is a proven real estate investment leader. Without using his own money or credit, Jay maximizes creative methods to buy and sell properties with profits averaging $64,000 per deal.
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Listen to our Podcast:
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Jay Conner (01:47):
My guest today, wow! What an amazing individual and dear friend, this guy is his foundational principles are based on faith, family, God coming first. Therefore, he and I have got a lot in common as far as the business world goes. He is the CEO and founder of a company called Simple Wholesaling. He’s been a full-time real estate investor for over 10 years now, and he’s done all kinds of real estate, but he specializes in wholesaling and wholetailing.
Jay Conner (02:47):
If you don’t know what wholetailing is, he can tell you all about that. My friend got extensive knowledge and firsthand experience in many facets of real estate investing. He’s an investor in the Indianapolis area and he works with investors all over the country who want to invest in one of the top rated cash flowing markets in the nation. Also, he’is amazing team buys and sells over 300 properties a year now and builds passive strings of income by creating over 50 creative financing deals per year.
Jay Conner (03:55):
As I said, my guest and friend is a manifesto and a real estate investor. What’s interesting, he’s been able to do something that many entrepreneurs have not been able to do and that is to combine both, to bring in opportunities to everyone he encounters while at the same time spreading what he believes in and is his passion — the Kingdom of God. He’s got a passion like I do for helping others in business and personal growth. As I mentioned, his family is very important to him. His wife is Karen, he has four young children, and he’s figured out how to balance family and running a very successful, large real estate investing business. And of course, he serves others through his faith. It’s my pleasure to bring onto the show right here, my friend and expert Brett Snodgrass.
Brett Snodgrass (05:27):
Thanks Jay. I’ve talked to you many times. You were on my podcast, the Brett Snodgrass podcast. And here we are again. I just love chatting with you, man.
Jay Conner (06:07):
You’ve built this fantastic wholesaling business up there in the Indianapolis area. You mentioned that you work with people all over the nation. What do you primarily do Brett, outside of your own business? Do you work with other people across the nation, helping them passively be involved in real estate and get high returns? Or do you actually coach other people that want to learn about wholesaling?
Brett Snodgrass (06:57):
As you mentioned, I’ve actually been doing real estate for more than 10 years. It’s actually coming up on 14 years now and I’ve done a lot of different things with real estate. I’ve done wholesaling, and I’ve done fix and flipping properties. We’ve done some creative or seller financing too. I have some rental properties. We’ve done some property management. So I’ve done all sorts of things with real estate.
About five or six years ago, what I realized is I really love the wholesaling chasing deals. I like the quick nickel rather than the slow dime, that sort of business. So that’s really where simple wholesaling was born. And that’s when I wanted a very simple business back in 2014, actually I said, I want a simple business.
Brett Snodgrass (07:47):
I want to go back into wholesaling and just doing a very fast-paced business. I want to build a team and scale it from this one man band to a team where I could have more freedom, right. That’s really why we all start this business is to have some freedom of money and freedom of time. So that’s when simple wholesaling was born and we’ve been doing amazing. So fast forward to today, last year we did a little over 300 deals. We do two between two and $3 million of type gross a year. I have a team right now, always growing a little bit, 13, 14 people. We work with virtual assistants as well.
Brett Snodgrass (08:33):
We mostly do wholesaling honestly and then we also do some creative financing where that’s where that passive income comes into play because the wholesaling business, you have to keep doing it over and over again every single month.
So I realized, I can’t do that forever, I need to build some passive income. That’s when we started to sell or finance some of these properties, where we are the bank and then we finance the properties and we do 40-50 of those a year. That’s where that passive income comes in. Then we also do some rentals here and there to save on taxes.
Jay Conner (09:12):
What’s the difference between wholesaling and whole tailing?
Brett Snodgrass (09:19):
Wholesaling is basically you meet with sellers, you get the properties under contract, and then typically you’re going to sell that contract or sign that contract to an investor for a fee. Some people possibly will not buy the property. You don’t have to close on the property, it’s really just finding deals and then selling that contract to an investor that’s wholesaling.
Whole tailing is where you do buy the property. You do close on the property, and then you do a little bit to the property. Maybe you clean out the property, maybe you do some things to look at, not to make the property look a little bit better but you don’t do a full rehab. You’re not doing the full rehab, you’re just doing a little bit to the property and then selling that to an investor. So instead of signing a contract, you close it, do a little bit to it, and then sell to investors on the back end.
Brett Snodgrass (10:26):
I use that word lightly because honestly, when we hold a tail, it’s basically we close on the property and then we clean it out. A lot of these properties are filled with junk or trash or personal belongings so it looks terrible. If someone were to walk into it, they’re like, “Wow, this looks really bad because there’s so much junk in it.” So we’ll send a crew, clean it out and then sell it. That deal, we call the whole tailing.
Jay Conner (10:57):
You said you just love chasing the deals or finding the deals. I’ve never seen a time in 18 years where there’s just nothing in the multiple listing service to buy. If you’re going to find it, you have to rely on off market houses, at least here in Eastern North Carolina. I hear that story all over the nation.
So with that being the case, what is yours and your team’s secret sauce? What’s your secret sauce right now in our economy for finding deals?
Brett Snodgrass (11:57):
We call them off market deals. We spend a lot of money and time on working with private sellers and in our marketing and following up. If you can find a deal right now it doesn’t have to be a great deal, it doesn’t have to be a deep discounted deal. It just has to be any type of deal that deal will sell.
Right now, it’s not hard to sell properties. Our inventory is very low. It’s the lowest it’s been in years. But we’re constantly still finding deals and we do that through different marketing channels. We do TV ads, that’s obviously a big marketing channel for us. We still do direct mail, we’re sending out letters and postcards. We’re cold calling sellers, so we get lists of sellers and we’re calling them up on the phone. We’re still doing a little bit of texting here and there. We’re driving for dollars. We’re doing any type of off market marketing that we can do right now to find any deals. And if we can find a deal, we know that we can sell it with the market that we have for sure.
Jay Conner (13:18):
So you mentioned one of your methods of finding and to make sure everybody knows an off-market deal just means it would be for sale by an owner that does not have their house listed with a real estate agent in the multiple listing service.
As you have over the years, a lot of these houses we buy the owners are not even marketing their houses. They don’t have a for sale by owner sign in their front yard. One of the channels or strategies you just mentioned of finding deals today is driving for dollars.
What do you mean by driving for dollars and how do you find people to drive for dollars?
Brett Snodgrass (14:00):
Driving for dollars basically means you just get in your car, you drive, and you’re looking for homes that you feel like the sellers might be motivated to sell. You’re looking for signs, right? You’re looking for tall grass that the yard hasn’t mowed in a month. Maybe the mailbox is full of mail because no one’s picking up that mail. It’s a vacant property. So it’s more susceptible to vagrants coming in and tearing up the property boarded up homes.
These are the signs that we’re looking for. So whenever we find a property that looks like, “Hey, this, this owner maybe is motivated to sell this property. We can either send them a letter.” We can skip, trace, and call them and just tell them, “Hey, we’re investors, we were driving through your neighborhood.”
Brett Snodgrass (14:57):
We found this property and saw, “Hey, you know, this is what it looks like, and you might be interested in selling it.” And that’s basically what driving for dollars is –we drive for dollars ourselves so people on our team drive for dollars.
We always train our acquisitions guys. These are the guys out in the field, they’re looking at properties meeting with sellers but they also have their phone on them. We use an app called Deal Machine, a great driving for dollars app. If they see a property, when they’re driving through these neighborhoods, they’ll use their Deal Machine app and skip, trace them, and call up that seller.
We also can find other people that we’ve met in the past. We hire them to drive for dollars too and you can pay them however you want per house or per day. It’s not hard right now to find people looking for freelance work.
Jay Conner (15:55):
We use many different ways of finding motivated sellers. When you got a vacant house and it’s clearly distressed, or there’s nobody living in it, and it hasn’t for a while. And the owners, according to the tax records live out of state, that’s probably going to be a pretty good sign of a motivated seller.
Brett Snodgrass (17:02):
It’s like if you have this random house in another city and you have your day job and you have your family and you have your kids and you’re busy and you’re doing all this stuff, you kind of just put the house on the back burner. And you’re like, “Oh, I’ll get to it one of these days.” And that day never comes.
Jay Conner (17:37):
Brett, you and your team got multiple exit strategies. You have multiple exit strategies, meaning you’re controlling a house and you’ve done marketing.
Now you got it under contract to purchase multiple exit strategies. You could do what we call, stay in the deal. You could actually do what we call, take it down. In other words, you actually close on your own contract that you’ve got under the purchase. You can stay in the deal and you can assign that contract to another real estate investor and you’re going to collect an assignment fee. You’re going to sell that contract.
Now they’re going to take it down. You can stay in the deal two different ways: You can stay in it on the whole tailing where you just clean it up or you do a major rehab. What’s your criteria on deciding what is your exit strategy from those choices?
Brett Snodgrass (18:41):
I like the quick nickel. So our first strategy is if we get our house on our contract and we can assign the property, we won’t market it but we’ll send it out to some buyers. We know our buyers pretty well so we’ll send it out to a few of them that think that would be interesting. If they’re interested, then we’ll just sign the contract. If they’re not interested or if it’s a deal that we don’t really know if you know a buyer for that, then we’ll go ahead and close on it.
Clean it out and then we’ll list it. We don’t do a lot of major rehabs right now just because of the season that we’re in. It’s almost like we don’t really have to do that just because there’s buyers out there.
Brett Snodgrass (19:28):
The inventory is really low so we feel we can make not as much money but we can make close to as much money as if we just cleaned it up and sold it to an investor. We didn’t have to spend that four to six months and the headaches and the stress of fixing up that property. Sometimes we do sell and finance it, but honestly, those just come. It’s not like we market it that way, we have some couple of agents and a couple of buyers that buy that way. And then that just kind of comes here and there. We don’t do a lot of full rehabs just because of the season that we’re in, but this is a market change.
Jay Conner (20:10):
It does change year to year. Since the market is so tight and inventory is so tight, there’s hardly anything in the multiple listing service to buy. Has that changed your formula on figuring what is the maximum amount that you will put a house under contract?
Brett Snodgrass (20:36):
This is probably a weird answer, but I actually stepped out of the business about a year ago, Brian Snyders, our CEO of the simple team now and they’re the ones that kind of come up with the formulas lately. Our formula has always kind of been we pay like 70% of the ARV or the comparison price value or whatever the brokers buy opinion. That was kind of our formula before. I look at it and I’m like, “Ah, I don’t know” I’m still stuck in two years ago, three years ago where I was buying that house for what, $30,000 cheaper, 40,000, $50,000 cheaper.
Brett Snodgrass (21:33):
We as investors, we always have to be pivoting and just be watching right now. I’m very conservative and the real estate market starts to tank. We’re all going to have to pivot sooner or later. Right now we can’t keep doing this forever. It’s like, “Hey, eating is good right now in the markets. The market’s hot,” but I’m like, “It’s going to change.” And when it does, we have to be ready.
Jay Conner (23:28):
Your podcast is sort of different as far as your line of questioning when you’re interviewing guests.
Brett Snodgrass (23:37):
I’m really just passionate about people that have a significant element to them. Like it is a lot more important to them than success. I talked to people about significance, about purpose. I go a little bit deeper on the show. We talk about family, marriage, kids, and balance.We talk about real life rather than just saying, “Hey, how do you make your next million?”
Jay Conner (24:15):
Speaking of that from your experience, what is the key to balancing family and business? How do you balance the chaos of having four kids running around, your relationship with your wife, and running a crazy business?
Brett Snodgrass (24:43):
Any entrepreneur will tell you that balancing family and your business is very hard.I have not done it super well, especially when I’m scaling and building a business in the early years.
Now, I’m in a stage where I can step out a little bit and just look at my priorities sometimes when you’re just in it. You’re grinding out every single day and you can’t hardly breathe because you’re just constantly in the middle of all of the minutia and you can’t be present with your family, you can’t be present with your kids. I see that all the time with entrepreneurs, and that’s why I talk about it on the podcast.
People don’t really talk about that much because they’re always talking about their business success but people don’t talk a lot about their family success or their marriage success or what they’re doing in their faith.
Brett Snodgrass (25:40):
That’s what I love to talk about. How do you balance it? It is really just taking a step back and trying to just do a priority board. Start listing what’s really important to you and when I took a step back, I started to ask myself some really hard questions because whatever decision that you make, you’re going to sacrifice something. When you’re scaling and building a business, you can say and give a little bit of a lip service to this and say, “Hey, I’m doing this so that one day I can spend time with my family and I’m trying to give them the things that I never had.” You can say all that but while doing it all, you’re sacrificing a lot of those special moments, those magic moments with your family.
Brett Snodgrass (26:34):
When I took a step back a year ago out of my business, I said, “Okay, I can maybe build another business.” I can do all of that, it is really going to help my family to make another X amount of dollars. Let’s say a million dollars easy, would it really help my family to make that? Or would it help them more if I was here? I was available and I got to spend the magic moments with them, and I got to pour into them rather than trying to juggle at a hundred miles an hour all the time. That’s the season that I’m in. I would just encourage every entrepreneur out there just to start asking yourself those hard questions and start to put your priorities in check.
I was talking to one entrepreneur one time and this really stuck with me because he was pretty successful.
Brett Snodgrass (27:27):
I saw him interact with his family and I was like, “How do you do that? How are you pretty successful? Then you have this amazing family over here too. Like, how do you do that? And he said, “Well, you know, I could always be more successful in business, but I will not sacrifice my family to do that.” And that really stuck with me.
I could do all these things and I would like to do all these things. I would love to speak and travel, do all these crazy things, build businesses and do it all and be an amazing dad too, and be an amazing husband. But I will tell you, I can’t. I have to pick and I have to choose depending on the season that I’m in. Right now I’m choosing my family during this season.
Jay Conner (28:21):
If you got that kid that’s at the sports game that’s got the recital, or you got that kid doing that’s important to them, is it important to you to be there? To support them with whatever they got going on? When it comes to your wife, your wife’s got something going on that’s important to her. Where do you choose to be and how do you choose to support what’s going on in her life, right?
Brett Snodgrass (28:52):
We just get caught in that trap with the media. If you type in six business successes on YouTube, all these messages are coming back at you and it looks great. It looks sexy. It’s exotic. And you’re driving the really fancy cars and the mansion and doing these exotic things. It looks amazing. Then they make the family, right? Your wife wants to go spend a night with her friends so I have to be home with the kids. If you don’t do all that, you miss out, and that’s where the purpose comes in. That’s where their fulfillment comes in.
Ask yourself, “Will I regret?” And that was one question I asked, ‘Will I regret not traveling around speaking all that?” Or “Will I regret not being present with my kids?” I don’t know. That was the question you’ve got to ask yourself sometimes and that’s what I did.
Jay Conner (29:59):
If you were visiting with your best friend and they did not judge you on the answer, how would you answer the question? If you can only give you one piece of advice, what is it?
Brett Snodgrass (30:37):
I will just say purpose and present. You know, I’m a big guy on go figure out what you’re made to do. How are you wired? What makes you come alive? What makes your heart come alive? What are you passionate about?
I see guys get in this trap all the time and they don’t know how to get out of it. They’re not living through their full purpose. So I say, try to figure that out. Spend some time, take a step back, figure it out, and live out your purpose.
Brett Snodgrass (31:29):
Many people, especially in today, can’t be present and we have to work so hard to be present, but that’s where all the magic happens. If you can just get caught up in the moment in the magic of your family or whoever you’re with, that’s just what I’m working for us and with my wife on be, I want to be really present. When I’m with my kids, I want to be extremely present. If I’m with you, Jay Conner, I don’t want to be thinking about something else.
So go after your purpose. Number one: figure out what that is and go after that and work on being present.
Jay Conner (32:09):
Your answer reminds me of a book. My dad is a very successful entrepreneur. Family’s very important to him. And for many years, he kept us supplied with this book in his office. Whenever someone would come visit with him, he always gave him this gift. The name of the book was The Precious Present. It’s a play on the word, present, the precious present and the gift is what you just said, being totally present for whoever you’re with. That’s the best precious present you can give anybody.
Brett Snodgrass (33:14):
I love it. I’m going to definitely check that out. I totally agree, Jay. Everything is fighting for our attention.
Jay Conner (33:27):
Thank you so much for taking the time to join me.
