You’ll Never Sell Your Real Estate Business…So You Might As Well Automate It

Posted in Real Estate  Print This

  

 

      I’m going to elaborate a little on my latest article with the same title, and make a few side notes that I saved for the blog.  It will make more sense if you read the article first.  There are links to each of these below, but not all of them are showing in blue for some reason.     

  

     3 Business Examples:

          1) Seatability, a company selling bungee-cord office chairs.

          2) MAC, a publicly-traded company that buys and sells 300 HOUSES PER MONTH.

          3) Homevestors, the only real estate franchise I know of

 

Seatability

      I used a company that sells chairs in the article as an example of a business that can be built, grown, and eventually sold.  I’m pretty sure my understanding of that industry is accurate, but if it is not, my friend/breakfast chum/blog subscriber Jason Barber will be sure to catch it.  He owns Seatability, which designs and sells chairs made with bungee cords, and his wit-laden comments can be found after several of my other posts.

 

 

MAC

     Dale Hensel has bought more houses than any guru you’ve ever heard of.  I met him at Matt Scott’s Private Money Boot Camp last year and when he casually mentioned his company buys 300 houses per month, my jaw clattered on the floor.  They are publicly traded, so they can raise enough money to buy large bundles of foreclosed homes and notes in default (maybe 50 at a time) from mortgage companies around the country, then they wholesale them to a network of local investors.  His story and company are worthy of its own blog post or interview sometime, so I’ll see if I can arrange that with him. 

 

 Homevestors Franchises

     This might be the only exception I know of to not being able to sell your real estate investment company.  Homevestors franchisees buy into, go through a lot of training, follow the company procedures and run their We Buy Ugly Houses ads, buy and sell houses, and are free to sell their individual franchise to another buyer if they want. 

 

     They are the only real estate investment franchise I know, and they’re not perfect from what I’ve heard, but I think it’s a great leap for our industry as a whole in becoming more legitimate and professional.  Of course, I didn’t have $200,000 lying around to start one of their franchises, so I had to do it the same way the rest of us did–learn as you go, a house here, a seminar there, until, after several years, you’ve learned the ropes and have a pretty extensive knowledge of real estate.