From Distressed Seller to 600 Off-Market Deals: How Agents Get Paid 3–4 Times Working With Investors

[00:00.02] Mattias Clymer: Welcome back to The REI Agent. My guest today is Jeremy Beland, real estate investor, entrepreneur and founder of REI Freedom and NH Home Buyers. Since 2017, Jeremy and his wife, Shelly, have closed almost 600 off-market deals across multiple states. Today, Jeremy helps real estate investors build more predictable acquisition businesses and works closely with agents and investors to solve challenging seller situations. Jeremy, welcome to The REI Agent Podcast.

[00:30.02] Jeremy Beland: Thanks, man. I appreciate you having me on your show today. I’m excited to be here. Yeah, excited to talk to you.

[00:36.58] Mattias Clymer: What’s that? Say that again?

[00:38.02] Jeremy Beland: I can’t wait to have a great conversation

[00:40.23] Mattias Clymer: today. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so tell me a little bit about how you got into the crazy world of real

[00:46.52] Jeremy Beland: estate. Yeah, well, it started about 10 years ago now. We’re just wrapping up our 10th year in real estate. But actually, the journey starts a little bit further than that. And, you know, I won’t go too far back into my story because, you know, we only have so much time for this podcast. But basically, you know, to start my real estate journey, we’d go back to my early 30s. So this would be pre-recession days, 2007, 2008. I was in my early 30s, married, previously married to my, you know, ex-wife at the time, two little kids. And, you know, from a kid who grew up very, very poor, I found myself in a sales job by the luck of God. And I turned out to do pretty well. And I was selling janitorial services, staffing services, and kind of running all over New England at that time, but I was making really good money, came from nothing. All of a sudden, I found myself in a position where I owned my own house. It was like a three-bedroom, two-bath house. We had a pool. We had a shed. We had nice cars. Stuff I never, ever experienced as a poor kid growing up. Life was really, really good. I was really happy. And then, you know, I started getting into multi-level marketing towards the end of, like, 2006, 2007. Just really started to feel like I wanted to do more. I kind of wanted to be more in control of my own thing, which led me to, of all things, a Trump University weekend seminar. Somebody had some tickets that I knew in the multi-level space, and then I went out, and I was just like, my mind was blown. And obviously, I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad prior to going out there. So I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, went to Trump University, and they talked about all these things. Now, Trump University, for some of you guys who don’t know, not to get political or anything, but they were sued because back then, the process of these seminars was where they were trying to upsell you each day. And by the end, they were making you call your credit card companies to increase your credit limits so you could buy into the $30,000 coaching program, which I didn’t do because I couldn’t afford it at that time. But anyway, I was starting to get my feet wet into what I thought was wholesaling at that time, and learned it from a few other coaches, Peter Conti and stuff like that. So I was just getting excited in that, and then the recession happened. And next thing you knew, I was, next thing I know, I was out of a job, and I could not afford my mortgage anymore, and I couldn’t find a job anywhere. And, you know, to backtrack a little bit, I never graduated high school. Matter of fact, I didn’t even really graduate middle school. They kicked me out of middle school because I was a troubled kid. I said, go to high school. And I lasted, you know, two or three years of not really doing anything except for getting in trouble and getting arrested. Eventually, I got out of high school, got my GED. But that’s really all I have for an education. So when 2008, 2009, the recession world was collapsing, you know, everybody in that time, we always think of it as a housing crisis, but it was also an employment crisis back then. So people who were much more educated than me, much more experienced with me, were actually looking for lower paying jobs and getting pushed down the, you know, down the totem pole of employment, so to speak, which pushed me down even further. I couldn’t find employment anywhere. And on the top of it, I was in the brink of losing my house because I couldn’t afford it anymore. So everything that I worked for was falling apart. And I was on the brink of foreclosure and bankruptcy, trying to figure out a way to go to get through, you know, being a dad of two young kids and a husband. You feel like you’re the provider and you’re feeling, you’re feeling I spiraled into depression, became suicidal. I didn’t know what to do. And then an opportunity presented itself where I could go into the military. I could join the Army and the Air Force and decide to go into the Air Force because it would be a better lifestyle for me at the age I was. And honestly, from somebody who was making $150,000 two years prior, I was going to the Air Force just to make $36,000 a year. Wow. That’s all I could find at that time. But it was going to provide me an opportunity to get an education. I was going to go in for network security with the idea that it would be recession-proof. And I would come out and I would sell, you know, network security to people because back then we didn’t know when the recession was going to end. It could have been for years and years and years. So in order to get my top-secret clearance into the Air Force, I couldn’t go through foreclosure and bankruptcy, which I was on the brink of. Now, back then, all the mortgage companies were folding left and right. There was no remodification programs. There was no refinance options because I was upside down, $150,000 in my home. It dropped $150,000 in equity in two years. The only reason why we held on for two years is because the mortgage companies kept folding and folding and folding. So there was no answer. But I knew enough about real estate investing because I was learning at that time. I was trying to get a wholesale deal and some other stuff, which I had to put on pause because I was in basically survival mode. I reached out to a local real estate investor and said, hey, here’s my situation. Can you help me? And my first off-market deal that I ever did, I was the motivated distressed seller. A real estate agent couldn’t help me. It was a real estate investor that came in and saved me. And he ended up coming in and short sale on my house. And what’s great about this story is during that time, because we were so poor. My wife still was working as a teacher, but, you know, she was making a minimal income at that time. You know, we didn’t have really money for groceries. We didn’t have money for Christmas. We didn’t have anything. This real estate investor came in and was like, hey, I will buy your washer and dryer for $600. I will buy your shed out back for $1,000. Because when you go through a short sale, some of your listeners may know, you can’t profit off of a short sale, right? So he was buying items in our house to give us cash that we desperately needed, which was literally grocery money that we needed, Christmas presents, clothes to put on my children’s back. It was a blessing. Although I was completely embarrassed about my situation at the time, he basically gave me a reset button in life. And because of that, I was able to go into the Air Force, join the basic training in the Air Force in June 2010, July 2010. I was 30, right before I turned 34 years old. I was in there, basic training with a bunch of 17-year-old kids. My nickname was Gramps. But it gave me the reset button in life. I went back, worked on myself, spiraled, got myself out of depression. A couple of years later, dug myself out of the deck, got myself into a job where I was making six figures again. All that to a point where then I got out of the Air Force, well, got out of basic training, got divorced. And then I found myself, you know, here in 2015, a divorced dad, two kids, and 40 is around the corner. I start listening to podcasts at that time, thinking I want to get into real estate investing, listening to flipping and buying and holding, bigger pockets. And then there was a wholesaling podcast from this guy named Tom Kroll. Brent Daniels runs it now, but it’s called the Wholesaling Inc. Podcast. And I listened to that thing as I was traveling around the country as a single divorced dad for a year with analysis paralysis saying, this is what I want to do. You know, I have no money. I can’t, I didn’t know that I had, I could use other people’s money at the time. I just like can’t buy rental properties. I can’t buy flips, but I can get into wholesaling. So basically, as I turned 40 years old, September of 2016, I sold my townhouse. That was the only thing I had for money. I had made $17,000 of equity because I bought it two years earlier. Took that $17,000, $11,000 of it went into my buying my business. $5,000 went into a coaching program with Wholesaling Inc. To teach me how to wholesale. $6,000 went into forming my LLC, you know, getting my document, my papers all set up for like contracts and assignment contracts. And then my marketing spend. That $11,000 went on to have me do 10 deals that year and moved my kids into a crappy little apartment to, you know, basically took a step backwards. And then by the end of that year, we built the foundation with, you know, my wife now, who was my best friend then. I convinced her to quit her job the end of that first year she came on. And, you know, we went on to do like 25 deals that second year. I worked full-time in my full-time employment job for the first three years of my business until I quit full-time. But as we stand here now, 10 years later, we’ve done almost 600 off-market deals. You know, we have rental properties. We have a whole team that’s been working with us for a year. But it all started with knowing what it’s like to be on the other side as a distressed seller. Gambling everything I had at 40 years old and restarting my life to take this new business venture. And, yeah, that’s where we are today. That’s a lot to

[09:41.90] Mattias Clymer: unpack right there, man.

[09:43.96] Jeremy Beland: That’s what I’m talking about.

[09:46.42] Mattias Clymer: No, it’s great. It’s great. I wanted to, first of all, like the first thing that popped in my head was I kind of completely forgot that Rich Dad Poor Dad does kind of pitch multi-level marketing, isn’t it? Isn’t that like one of the things that’s in that book?

[09:59.34] Jeremy Beland: Yeah, I don’t know if that was the reason why, but, you know, I happened to read it. And then just a friend of mine knew I was getting into learning about real estate. He’s like, oh, I got this Trump University seminar free tickets. And I was like, oh, I’ll go.

[10:11.74] Mattias Clymer: Well, no, because that book is like, you know, has gotten so many people I talk to into real estate. There’s been, it’s changed a ton of people’s lives. And I just kind of forgot about that part of it because I’m pretty sure he does talk about that as well. But the next thing, obviously, I want to talk about is, you know, how an investor helps you and how that’s a really powerful story example of kind of like maybe a why and whatever. But I think one of the disconnects between real estate agents and real estate investors, especially wholesalers, can be this like predatory kind of like dogma or stigma that they think that the people are getting taken advantage of. And, you know, it’s really, it’s really two different things. And I think it’s just important to understand that in both, on both sides, there could be people that are kind of like shady and shysters and talk out of both sides of their mouths and are not practicing ethically. And that, but on the same token, there are amazing people doing, helping people and doing amazing work on both sides. So, like, I think first and foremost, like, you know, that’s an amazing example of how, I mean, it wasn’t a wholesale situation. But how you, you were, you know, really done right by somebody. Yeah.

[11:28.08] Jeremy Beland: Yeah. So, you know, honestly, I’m all for wholesale regulations because I think they need it now. You know, years ago, I didn’t think so much. But, you know, with the social media, YouTube, virtual wholesaling and everything else, you know, you got a lot of people who didn’t do what I do, which I invested money into coaching to be taught things. It’s a professional way of doing things in the right way of things. And people are just kind of doing it their own way. And again, a few bad apples, you know, could spoil the whole bunch. And that happens. And there’s a lot of regulations to stop preventing that. But I think in general, a majority of the people who focus on off-market space, you know, I’m obviously not just a wholesaler now. We are a cash buyer as well. But, you know, we’re there to help people. When I tell people, you know, as a coach or people that we hire for sales guys in our company, it’s really important to understand in our business model, the house is just a commodity. Right. We’re house buyers, but the house isn’t really the business. It’s the people. We’re in a people serving business. We’re there to provide solutions to people who are in tough situations. We’re not the right fit for a lot of people. We’re trying to identify the people that we can bring value to, help them out of difficult situations. A lot of times that traditional real estate agents and real estate transactions can’t. And what they do is they then pay us back with equity in the home. They’re like, hey, we’re in a tough situation. I’d love to pay you $20,000, $30,000 and get me out of this and make me have a better life. I don’t have $20,000, $30,000. But what I do have is some equity in my house. My house is a piece of junk. You’re going to have to figure out how to do something with it. But I’ll give it to you so you can make some money if you can help me out in this tough situation. So, you know, agents sometimes lose track of that, you know, because they think of everything in this little box, right? This is how we’re taught. Everybody’s motivated for highest and best dollar. That isn’t the case. Majority of the retail space is. But some people, money is not important to them at all. It’s getting themselves out of a difficult situation. I needed money back in 2008, 2009. But what I needed more was to get out of that situation and get into the Air Force so I could provide for my family. That’s what was important to me. So, you know, that’s what we typically do in this off-market space is we’re out there solving people’s problems that a lot of times traditional real estate can’t solve. And they pay us in exchange with equity in their home.

[13:54.12] Mattias Clymer: Yeah, yeah, well said. Okay, so now you have, fast forward, you say you have a whole team kind of running this and now you’re also doing cash buying. Get into your operations a little bit more and kind of, you know, are you specifically in certain states? Are you across the whole nation, et cetera?

[14:12.62] Jeremy Beland: Yeah, no. So I’m not in the whole nation. You know, back in 2019, because, hey, I kicked butt here in New Hampshire. We were doing so good for a couple of years. That’s it. And I went out to our coaching training out in Buffalo, New York. And I was like, whoa, look at all these distressed properties out here in Buffalo. There’s like a sea of them. We’re here in New Hampshire. That isn’t the case, right? But there was just miles. I was like, oh, my God, I’m in wholesale paradise. So we decided to start our Western New York homebuyers, hit the ground virtually, failed, finally found some boots on the ground, had some great success in New York. I actually ended up doing about 150 wholesale deals in a year, two and a half years, and bought some rental properties out there and then split weight. But we went into Wichita, Kansas for like a couple of years, did a couple of thousand deals, went to Las Vegas, been in Florida for a couple of years. We’re actually pulling out of Florida as we speak now after the last few years. So I’ve been in different states, and I own some rental properties down in Jackson, Mississippi as well. But for the most part, we’re here in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. We’ve just expanded into Connecticut and Rhode Island in the last 12 months. New Hampshire, Mass., has been since day one. So now going forward, we’re just kind of focusing on this like radius. It’s two and a half, three-hour radius of where we live here in New England. It just happens to be a few different states because they’re all four states here in New England. But, yeah, you know, we are all about off-market acquisitions. So we spend a lot of money generating opportunities, leads, conversations. And then our sales approaches, you know, we have four sales guys, five if you include myself. We go out, meet with sellers, identify, are we even a fit to work with each other? If we are, what kind of problems do they have? How can we solve your problems? Then we lock the property up under contract. Then we decide what the best exit strategy is. Sometimes it’s to wholesale it. Sometimes we list it on the MLS as like a wholesale. We call it a wholesale, but it turns into like a novation, which is a trendy word. Sometimes it’s a sign as well. Sometimes we buy the house, we clean it, do nothing to it, just clean it, list it as is. Sometimes we buy it, we renovate it, sell it. Sometimes we keep it, turn it into a rental, do the BRRRR method. So it really just depends on the house, the situation, you know, how many properties we have in the pipeline at any given time, you know, just our bandwidth and a lot of cash flow needs, things of that nature. You know, typically, you know, we’re such a cash buyer and we’ve built a lot of private lending. Now, we don’t use hard money at all unless we really need to in case of emergency. But thankfully, we have access to about $8 million to our private lender network that people that we built great, strong relationships with. So it’s not uncommon for us to have like 20 properties at any given time that we own from, you know, the time we bought it to a trying to where it’s listed and be in any various stages in between. This isn’t rental properties or anything. These are houses we’re buying to resell. So we always have quite a bit of high volume at any given time.

[17:20.10] Mattias Clymer: Wow. Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, I was going to ask about rental properties, if you’re picking up those along the way as well. And, you know, I think I’ve taken the same approach where if I come across a property that needs to be, you know, renovated or whatever, and I love the location, think it would be a great rental. You know, I hold on to it. I would try to work the BRRRR method. And then if it’s something that I, you know, I think it’s better just to move on from, then you sell it. It’s a flip. So it sounds like you guys take a similar approach. And you said based on like cash flow needs, that kind of stuff as well as some other considerations.

[17:51.22] Jeremy Beland: Kind of feed the business first, right? I have a team. My cash burn every month is expensive with payroll and marketing costs and operational costs. So, you know, I have to feed the beast first. But, you know, personally, we look at any kind of rental opportunity, if it makes sense to keep it or not. You know, for us, because of the business we are, we do get taxed a lot. So anytime we can do a BRRRR or two every year, those cost segregation tax advantages help us a lot to pay, you know, lack of Uncle Sam costs at the end of the year. So we do that. You know, typically up here in the Northeast, you know, you can’t really benefit off of anything less than a three family. So you have to look three, four, five, six family. And even then, you know, with the BRRRR method, you don’t cash flow very well for the first couple of years. It’s like it pays for itself at best. But we get a lot of great appreciation up here. So, you know, you have to think of like, all right, I’m going to save some money on taxes those first couple of years. Hopefully it pays for itself. We don’t have too many headaches or vacancies. And then, you know, by the time you hit year three and four, it starts to bring in some cash flow. But, you know, the equity in some of these properties, you know, we bought a property. We just finished our fifth year refinance, right? So we had a five-year fix, refinance it. You know, when we originally bought that house, it was appraised at $450,000 after we’d done the, you know, the renovations. And it was just appraised at $900,000, almost doubled in price in five years on a five family. So, you know, significant appreciation there. So, but I will tell you that majority of my rentals has been a complete S-show, nightmare, headaches. They’re not everything that you see on social media and TV and everything else. I mean, they definitely have the pros. There’s a lot of cons that come with it. That’s why you see a lot of tired landlords in this space. But I think if you have clearer expectations of the reality of buying these properties, as opposed to what may be misled to you on social media things, then, you know, you’ll be okay. You just got to have realistic expectations.

[19:54.50] Mattias Clymer: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I want to draw some parallels. And I want to talk about, about like, you know, maybe some ways that the two worlds, if you will, could connect a little bit more and maybe work together a little bit more. But, I mean, what you’re doing is a hyper-niched, like, you know, it’s like somebody being, you know, hyper-niched in a sales job. Like, you know, like, and, you know, say, like, they only work with lakefront properties or something to that extent. You’re like a hyper-niched, you’re marketing to a specific demographic. And since it’s so niche, you cover a pretty big footprint, right? And you have a whole team kind of set up for this. But you’re a real estate professional. You know, real estate agents are real estate professionals. And a lot of real estate agents probably don’t fully understand that cost seg thing that you just talked about. And I think, you know, whether or not you are picking up a property that needs rehab, maybe you’re not wanting to do, go through all that. Picking up, you know, I mean, shoot, picking up a new construction that offers, like, a really awesome, you know, buyer-agent bonus or something like that that you can use to help put down as a down payment. You know, there’s a lot of different ways to get into that tax savings and start, you know, getting that appreciation, start having that debt payoff, start having all those benefits of home ownership, having a rental. But the cost seg and, you know, that accelerated appreciation is something that really people need to think about. If they’re a real estate designated professional, you know, full-time real estate agent you are, double-check with your accountant. But that’s a huge opportunity here. And one of the things I talk about as well often is syndications. And, you know, I’ve mentioned this many times before, but, you know, we bought into a mobile home park syndication, put $50,000 into it, and we were able to write off, like, $66,000 the first year. And our taxes, we only owned it for, like, we were only in it for, like, two months at that point. And so, I mean, that is an example of, like, how powerful this kind of thing can be and why you should really be considering this kind of thing in your portfolio.

[22:06.14] Jeremy Beland: Another thing, you

[22:06.16] Mattias Clymer: know, yeah, rentals, they can, depending, you know, what kind of property it is. If you’re dealing with, like, a multifamily kind of stuff, it might be in, like, more areas that are a little bit more rough. You know, so there’s all sorts of different types of rental investing that you can do, and you can have management. And, you know, it’s really more a long-term play. Like, I mean, if anybody tells you that you’re going to, right now, you know, get a rental portfolio and just be able to retire, they’re probably lying.

[22:36.14] Jeremy Beland: I would have to see anybody doing that, by the way.

[22:39.36] Mattias Clymer: They’re probably lying to you, but it is a long-term play. It is way more about that equity growth buildup. And the cash flow gets sweeter as time goes on, like you mentioned. But, you know, the hard times, like you mentioned, like, you know, that they happen.

[22:55.34] Jeremy Beland: I love the fact

[22:55.36] Mattias Clymer: that, so I went against the grain, and I had my first house that we ended up keeping as a rental. We put on a 15-year mortgage, and we kept it as a rental. We’re scraping by, you know, cash flow-wise.

[23:10.24] Jeremy Beland: It should be

[23:10.26] Mattias Clymer: better than it is, but that’s another story. But the point of it is, is that, you know, we only owe, like, $30,000 on that property anymore. And, you know, before long, it’s going to be paid off. And it is really nice. Now, people are going to argue with me that, you know, that’s not a great return on my equity. Like, I could apply that equity somewhere else and get a much better return. But at the end of the day, I like having one like that where I could sell it, I could refinance it, I could do a lot of different things and get access to a good amount of capital and get myself out of a pickle if I need to. And so I really like that as part of, like, looking at this as maybe like a portfolio, you know, like looking at it as a whole. But, yeah, all that rambling to say, you know, we, I think agents should realize that, you know, wholesalers are kind of like a niched, you know, agent. It’s not that, not that different, you know. They’re just solving problems that typically we can’t. What are some ways that you have worked with other agents or do you have relationships with other agents? You talked about listing properties on the MLS. Is anybody licensed in your company? Are you licensed? Are you then also listing them or are you partnering with agents in that? Yeah.

[24:24.58] Jeremy Beland: So, listen, a couple of different things that I’m back and I’ll answer that question. First of all, if you’re an agent, one of the things you can do, a lot of agents that I know, they house hack. And if you guys don’t know what that is, is you can buy a multifamily with an FHA conventional, you know, 5%, 3% down on a 3-4 family, live in one unit, right? And you can do that every couple of years. It’s a good way to get into this space, by the way. And if you don’t know what cost segregation is, anytime you put major renovations into a property, you can use that, those renovations as write-offs. And for me, it can mean many tens of thousands of dollars that I don’t have to pay in taxes every year. It saves me a fortune. And then a lot of people get more money for a long term.

[25:08.22] Mattias Clymer: It’s not just for renovations, I don’t think. Like, I think, so, like, you basically, the IRS has, like, a, like, think about a spreadsheet of everything in a house and they kind of each have their own, like, lifespan. So, like, instead of saying 27 years, you take 27 years off the, you can, you know, have a separate line item for, like, your roof or for appliances or for shades or whatever. And so it’s a really complicated, like, breakdown of, like, you know, trying to basically maximize how, what you can get off of your taxes up front instead of spreading it across.

[25:39.98] Jeremy Beland: It’s absolutely great. So, you know, anybody listening to that, you should think about that. But you don’t have to do it alone. And you can actually even partner up with somebody in your area like me that can do that. And I actually partner up with a lot of agents. So we love working with agents. And, you know, we are very actively, as a marketing channel, working to build our relationships with agents throughout the area. So the way we work with agents is, you know, I’m not interested in an agent having a house that’s listed and saying, hey, Jeremy, I have a house that’s listed. We want to pull you an offer. You know, I’m looking for an agent that, because, let’s face it, there’s a lot of properties you come across. And there’s going to be situations where you just don’t know what to do. A hoarder house. Maybe there’s a ton of junk out in the yard and you just don’t know what to do. The house is definitely not going to pass for any kind of conventional or, you know, rehab type loan because it’s in just disrepair. Maybe it’s a nicer house. The guy needs to relocate. He’s going to be out of the house in three weeks. He doesn’t have time to throw it on the market, right? There’s all these scenarios where a traditional listing doesn’t help. But that doesn’t mean you have to just say, well, there’s nothing I can do and I’m just going to move on to something else. People like me can go in. What we tell the agents to do is when you have this situation, bring us in. My sales guy or me and my wife will sit down with the agent. We’re going to meet with the seller. That way the agent can see us talking to sell. We’re very transparent and honest in everything we do. We’re not looking to poach your leads or anything like that. We want to see, can we help this person? And then they see, like, how we help these people in the conversations they have. And their mind is blown. They’re like, well, I had no idea this is what you guys did in this space because they don’t know what they don’t know. And when they come out of there, they’re like, I can’t believe you can do all that stuff. Then what we do is the agent brought us into the opportunity. We handle the sales or their appointment. We get it under contract. Then we pay the agent both sides of the listing, right? 2% for the listing side, 2% for the buying side. Now they’re making 4% just for bringing us into the door on a house that they would have never done anything with to begin with. Then when we go to resell the property, we give them the listing. So they get paid three times, potentially four times on one house on a property that 99% of the time they weren’t going to do anything with. And then on top of that, because we do so much of our own stuff, we’re always reselling our own properties. And we don’t have an in-house agent. So we use many of the relationships that we have to list this flip, to list this house, to list that house. So we’re looking to build relationships. And a lot of the agents that work with us make six figures a year. Multiple agents make six figures a year in commission, bringing us properties and listing the properties that we give them in return based on those relationships. We even partner with them. Well, they’ll bring us this opportunity and they say, hey, listen, can I partner on it? Sure. We’ll buy a cash and we’ll do all the work that needs to get done. But instead of me paying you some commissions up front and you get the commissions on the back end, we’ll just take the net profit and split it 50-50. I had an agent last year that made $37,000 in 45 days for giving us an opportunity. And we had to do a ton of legwork behind the scenes. So that’s pretty much how we work with agents. We love working with agents. It’s just getting to educate agents of the benefit for them, how they can make money on working with people like us in situations where they typically wouldn’t. So it’s just more of education. Once they do one time, it’s like, when can I do another one? It’s like my private lenders. They go through one transaction. They’re like, can we do another one? Can we do another one? So that’s how we work with agents. And I love working with agents.

[29:22.26] Mattias Clymer: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, honestly, it just seems like there is an opportunity to have, you know, kind of like two arms of one organization where you could like kind of. Because I would imagine you’re also, you know, so with your marketing and you talked about how you’re not a good fit for a lot of people. I mean, I feel like there could be really good referrals there as well. Like where, you know, like you’re not, you need to list your house. Like there’s no reason you shouldn’t be talking to us right now. Like that kind of thing.

[29:51.02] Jeremy Beland: Yeah. You know, 100%. We do that all the time. So that’s another good point. Agents get a lot of referrals from us, right? And when an agent meets with a seller that doesn’t feel like it’s going to be a good fit for them, all they have to say is, hey, listen, I have somebody that I work with that may be able to help you. Would you be open to meeting with them with me to see if they’re a fit for you? That’s it. And then we’ll go in. And, you know, most of those times we are, but sometimes we’re not. And we’re never going to force anybody into a situation that isn’t best for them or best for us, right? And sometimes we’re like, you should just list it with this agent right here. That is what you need to do. Yeah. Yeah.

[30:28.40] Mattias Clymer: And I think it’s just good for, you know, agents to understand some of the different tools that are available. I think that, you know, it’s really easy to only understand the, you know, the black and white, you know, you put it on the market, you get, you know, a buyer that’s cash or has financing and, you know, you sell it that way. I mean, I think there’s, it’s just important to know whether or not they want to get involved with any kind of investing. Like if they want to do it themselves, I think it’s just good to understand what opportunities or what tools could help people. Because at the end of the day, I think the more people you help, the more you’re able to like be a resource to people, the better it is for your business and people want to go to you because you’re like kind of the expert in real estate. And, you know, there, there are, there’s, there’s been a number of times where, you know, I’ve come across some situations where I’ve had to think, you know, really creatively to try to figure out a solution for them. And, and like we’ve just talked about often listing, it isn’t, um, and there’s been times where, you know, honestly, I have, I’ve had a couple of times where I just, there hasn’t been a solution even. So, I mean, you even come across some of that, uh, like maybe a short sale would have been, uh, appropriate for this person.

[31:43.44] Jeremy Beland: Right, right now I’m in agreement like that. Yeah. We have a lot of creative ways to help people out that people don’t know, like, you know, we’ll buy sub two to flip and sub two to sell. We don’t believe in sub two longterm, but we do believe in sub two sometimes as a bridge of gap to get somebody out of a situation if equity is kind of tight. Um, but you know, in your perspective, my friend, you know, again, I’m not an agent, but if I was, you’d be crazy not to work with an investor. Right. So if you think of like the retail space and most agents, they’re making their money off of referrals, right? That’s the majority of what they do, especially if they’ve been in the business as a referral based business and, you know, they have a client and what does the average client do for repeat business? Come back every five to seven years, right? That’s typically how it kind of works with the retail sale, but when you work with an investor like me, you’re talking five to seven or more transactions a year. So if you’re somebody who’s doing, you know, 10 to 15 sides a year, you could almost do 50%, if not double your business in a year working with somebody like me. And it doesn’t even cost you any money because it’s not like you’re going out spending money on all these new opportunities. These are leads that are coming to you right away that you’re just putting aside. And these are opportunities where you can significantly help your bottom line personally. But like you said, also provide value to these people in a tough situation, because unfortunately, as much as we try to reach out to a lot of these people who are in these difficult situations, people just aren’t educated on cash buyers and investors. Some people are, some people aren’t. All they know is a real estate agent. So they just look to a real estate agent because that’s what they think they should do. And when a real estate agent comes in and says, I can’t help you with my house, they’re like, I don’t know what to do next. Right. So now you can help that person in a difficult situation by offering them different options and solutions. And you’re the hero, not me. You’re the hero. It’s good for your business. You’re going to be the one to recognize as the person who brought the solution in. And now you can get paid two, three, four times on that same house. I mean, it’s a no brainer to me.

[33:43.70] Mattias Clymer: Yeah. Yeah. That’s well said. Yeah, I think, I think, you know, you know, if you’re in an area that you’re not sure where to find kind of a partner or whatever, I think probably looking for, you know, a real estate investor meetup would be a good place to kind of start. And it certainly doesn’t help hurt to make relationships there. And, you know, I think that, again, I don’t know why it really feels often like it’s two different worlds, but it really doesn’t have to be. It, it, it, like, I was surprised when I first, like, cause I got, I was agent first, I became agent first. And then I got really into like the idea of investing and doing all that. And I was, I was a bit blown away by the whole different world it was. And just, yeah. So I think, I think it’s good to learn it a little bit, but, you know, make some relationships. You could, you could help people. I wouldn’t go into one of those, like, you know, with a sales pitch for everybody, but you try to find a genuine relationship with, with an investor where you can find some win-win solutions. And, and, you know, even there could be like co-marketing campaigns. If you find, you know, a motivated person who wants to get into wholesaling or something like that, you could try to do some sort of co-marketing plan where maybe, you know, you agree to pay X amount of the marketing costs every month. And then, you know, you would get any of the opportunities that don’t make sense for a wholesale.

[35:11.86] Jeremy Beland: A hundred percent. And, you know, and I think, you know, from an agent standpoint, you know, a lot of it is just because it’s a little bit of intimidating talk to, to an investor and a cash buying investor when you don’t know about it. And a lot of times you have these preconceived notions, but I would just say do a little research, a little homework, right? They’re, they’re not all created equal. As we talked about wholesalers, right? There are some bad apples out there in any space, just like there are in the, you know, the real estate industry space. So look for somebody who is buying a lot of houses in the area, has a history, you know, like us, we have a lot of Google reviews, have a lot of testimonials. We’ve been around the market for a long time. We have a name for ourselves. Position yourself with somebody like that, as opposed to somebody who maybe does one, two, three houses a year. I mean, it’s not to say that that person won’t work out, but they’re probably not going to be able to give you a lot of opportunities where somebody on the larger side, they may be able to, you know, we had a new agent that we met through one of our agent outreaches. They brought us an opportunity last December. We’re getting ready to buy the third house. They brought us here in a week. So it’s been 10 months, three houses that they brought us, but we’ve also given them three flips. So we’re going to be doing six transactions with this one realtor that we just met our first deal 10 months ago. Right? So how much business did we already make her this year in 2026 by being a connection where she wasn’t going to do anything and giving her all these flips? And some of these flips are $600,000, $700,000 homes. She made a pretty good commission on these houses, you know? Yeah.

[36:40.78] Mattias Clymer: Yeah. No, it’s awesome. I mean, I feel like we’ve already gotten a lot, but what kind of golden nuggets are you bringing for our listeners today?

[36:50.78] Jeremy Beland: Well, I think that’s just a lot of what they need to do. I think if you’re a real estate agent, you really need to start thinking, you know, adding some kind of real estate investor in your local community as a tool in your toolbox. It’s not going to be something that you use a lot, but don’t let opportunities pass you. If you can build a relationship with somebody like me, you know, it should be a two-way street. You should be able to bring them opportunities and they should be able to bring you opportunities. It should be a relationship where you guys are looking to invest for many years to help both of your businesses. If you can get yourself somebody like that, it’ll be a significant improvement to your overall business and your reputation.

[37:29.84] Mattias Clymer: Yeah. I love that. Now, we mentioned Rich Dad Poor Dad, but do you have any other books that you think are fundamental to date?

[37:38.68] Jeremy Beland: I mean, I have a whole bunch. This is a good one. And this is called Equity Happens. It’s by Robert Helms and Russell Gray. They own the Real Estate Guys radio shows, podcasts. They’ve been around for like 20 years. But this shows you, we talked about buying rental properties, right? This shows you the power of buying and holding on to rental properties for five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, and how that can change your life. A lot of times as you talk about rental properties, we, oh, this property is a cash cow. Oh, you’re going to get it and you’re going to get three rental properties and you can retire. It doesn’t work that way. But if you can buy rental properties, especially through the BRRRR method and sit on them for 10 years, a lot can change drastically in 10 years. This is a great, great book. It’s hard to find. Equity Happens actually paid $90 for this on Amazon. Hard to find. Great, great read.

[38:38.42] Mattias Clymer: Okay. That’s a new one for me. I love it. And I just got a quick, if you’re not familiar with the BRRRR method, if you’re listening to this and confused, but we keep throwing that out there. It’s basically like flipping a house. So you probably understand that where you’re creating value through, you know, making a house nicer. And then instead of selling it and getting that equity, you’re refinancing the money out of it and using that equity created as like a down payment, essentially. So if you do 100% BRRRR, you’re basically getting a house for no money in, no cash in. And that’s obviously a powerful method. Just to add on to that quick, you know, you mentioned doing like the house hacking method as a way to get started. It’s brilliant. If you can get into some rentals that way, you know, low money down, et cetera, you’re going to build equity over time. You can get equity lines of credit on these properties and then start, you know, accessing that equity and using that as capital to fund deals like BRRRR deals where you can buy a house with cash because sometimes they are needed when they are run down like that. And this is how that kind of this can all kind of snowball. You can start becoming more dangerous the more equity you have, I guess you can say. And then finally, to just encourage people to, you know, take action is, you know, a lot of people might be like, you know, you can’t make anything work right now. The interest rates are too high. Everything’s too tough. It’s just not going to work. It is harder. You know, there might be some other opportunities. Like there might be some ways to get more cash flow out of a deal like midterm rental, short-term rental, you know, co-housing, co-living, sober living. I mean, there’s all sorts of different ways to potentially make this, make things work. But just know that like, you know, I use this example sometimes too is that I had a coworker, a good friend, you know, who had like 30 rental properties when the interest rates went to like 2%, right? And he refinanced them all. You can’t tell me when it’s interest rates are that low that you’re going to be able to buy 30 rentals.

[40:44.46] Jeremy Beland: But

[40:44.47] Mattias Clymer: he’s in a great spot.

[40:47.22] Jeremy Beland: Yeah, yeah. No, you’re right. You know, you talked earlier too. Like everybody thinks doors, doors, doors in the real estate space. Listen, it’s just, that’s just a way to brag and boast. Sometimes less is more. You don’t need 300 doors. You can have 30 doors with a lot of equity in them and be probably more successful and have more wealth than somebody who has 300 doors that split 45 different ways. Not that there’s anything wrong with syndication and stuff, but, you know, to each their own. But, you know, you can’t scale anything putting 20% down on every purchase. There’s just no way in paying retail prices, right? If you’re going to go on the market and buy a retail house for 20% down, that’s not going to do it. The BRRRR method is a way to find these distressed properties, force appreciation. You’re using other people’s money to do that. And as you said, you refinance, you have that 20% equity, set as a down payment, little to no money out of pocket. Then you can start to, you know, do a couple of those at a time if you can find the great opportunities and find somebody else’s money to use. But in the meantime, house hacking is a low barrier cost to get into the multifamily space. That allows you to live in a property for a year, if you live in it, when technically you’re supposed to live in it for a year, you know, then you buy another one the next year. And then you can pay those retail prices because your down payments are so low. And you can easily scale that way, do that for a handful of years, build that equity. And then, like you said, now you have some equity and power that can be pretty crazy. So, yeah. Yep.

[42:20.48] Mattias Clymer: And all that along the way, you know, you can use the tax advantages and stuff. Because if you’re really focused on just selling, obviously, you need a place to live. So, why not house hacking? Even if it’s a single family house, like, you know, it’s

[42:34.19] Jeremy Beland: still, you know, an opportunity. But, yeah. Now, what about

[42:39.36] Mattias Clymer: if people, you know, got such great golden nuggets out of this? And by the way, if you’re listening to this and you’re driving down the road and you don’t have time to take notes, et cetera, go to REIAgent.com. We have a blog posted for every episode.

[42:52.84] Jeremy Beland: Sign up

[42:52.86] Mattias Clymer: for our newsletter and you’ll get a summary of this week’s episode. But anyway, if people were wanting to follow you more, et cetera, where are you on social media, et cetera?

[43:04.68] Jeremy Beland: Yeah. The best way to just, I mean, I’m on all the socials. Jeremy Beland, J-E-R-E-M-Y, B as in boy, B-E-L-A-N-D, Jeremy Beland. You know, you find me on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram. If you’re here in the Northeast, you know, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, listening to this and you want to have a conversation, I’d love to talk to you, especially if you’re an agent. And see how we can possibly work together. You know, I do have a coaching business as well. You know, I am scaling that to more one-on-one. It used to be one-to-many, but now it’s one-on-one as we go forward. I do work with some real estate agents there because we do focus on acquisition and sales type training. But a majority of that is working with investors who are doing a handful of deals a year but don’t know the steps they need to get to a handful of deals a month. So that’s basically what I do. But for your audience, if you’re a real estate agent, even if you’re in a different part of the country, you want to reach out to me and ask me what it’s like to work with somebody like me. I’m happy to take a few minutes out of my day to talk to you, to help you in any way I can. I’m happy to.

[44:08.70] Mattias Clymer: Well, Jeremy, thank you so much for that. And thank you so much for being on the show. I think you’ve given a lot

[44:13.32] Jeremy Beland: of insights to

[44:14.26] Mattias Clymer: many people. So thank you. Thank you so much.

[44:17.24] Jeremy Beland: Pleasure to be here, my friend.