Agents are Leaving Six Figures On the Table: How to Make Millions with Andy Coleman

Transcript

[Mattias]
Welcome to the REI Agent, a holistic approach to life through real estate. I’m Mattias, an agent and investor.

[Erica]
And I’m Erica, a licensed therapist.

[Mattias]
Join us as we interview guests that also strive to live bold and fulfilled lives through business and real estate investing.

[Erica]
Tune in every week for interviews with real estate agents and investors.

[Mattias]
Ready to level up?

[Erica]
Let’s do it. Welcome back to the REI Agent. This is Erica, your host here with Mattias.

Hi. And we are kind of back in the saddle, back home, kind of getting back into the swing of things after being in Austin last weekend for the REI Summit. But when we came home, you know, nothing is ever easy for us.

Mattias got COVID.

[Mattias]
Yeah. So I’m persevering. This is the, I think, fourth episode I’ve recorded now with COVID.

Yeah. The first two, I didn’t realize I had it, but I knew I was a little off, so I tested positive the next day. But here we are.

[Erica]
Yeah.

[Mattias]
I had a bushy tail.

[Erica]
You’re hanging in there. Austin was amazing. Neither one of us had been there before, and so a really cool city to check out.

And I got to hear from some great speakers, so much information that weekend.

[Mattias]
Yeah, no, it was really a great timing, just a good time to explore a new city, get away with you as well. I think some themes that stuck with me were, A, kind of running your, trying to run your family, kind of like a business, with clear values and vision and mission statement, which we’re kind of working on. I mentioned this in the intro on another episode, but we’re kind of working through this a little bit.

Currently, we’re gonna keep going. We got pretty far on the trip, but then at a certain point, we’re just like, oh my gosh, I don’t know if I can talk about values anymore.

[Erica]
Yeah, I think the other cool thing, and maybe you mentioned this too already, but we got to meet some people in person that we had only ever met before over video, and especially like Grant, Frankie, we had on the podcast very early on when we started this podcast originally, and he was there speaking and got to meet him and his wife in person. I think that’s just always so fun.

[Mattias]
Yeah, and how you can feel so connected and that they’re good friends, and then you finally actually meet them. And Grant’s a lot taller than I expected. Shout out to Grant.

The other theme that I left the conference with was kind of treating like building a business that buys real estate instead of just kind of buying real estate. And so for the side of things where we are buying and investing in real estate, that’s kind of gonna be a focus as we keep going. But yeah, it was a really good time.

[Erica]
Yeah, it was. And then coming back this week, you have not been feeling great and so have been home kind of resting. And I got more of a front seat for the landlording duties.

So yesterday I took the kids with me, and thankfully it was in the quadruplex where your parents also live, so they were able to watch the kids, but I spent the morning cleaning out a dryer vent. And some of those, that was a first for me. Felt like I was making it rain and snow outside and with all the lint coming out, got totally covered.

And I was like, this is, but it felt good. It was kind of fun. We got to meet our new tenant, and she was great.

[Mattias]
Yeah, that’s one flaw of this quad. The dryer vents for all four properties are really long. They go, they’re kind of in the back corner of the house, and they go all the way out to the back, which is not ideal, but.

[Erica]
No, well they also go up. Like you have to kind of defy gravity going up the vent to where the vent is on the outside.

[Mattias]
Yeah, yeah, so we’ll have to, you know, build a system then, I guess, to try to clean those regularly, because they get clogged.

[Erica]
Yeah. So today we just talked to Andy Coleman. He is out of Florida, and he is talking about his strategies to earn income through rental compensation.

Did I say that right?

[Mattias]
Yeah, so he basically puts tenants into leases, and there’s a few different ways he does it, but yeah, he will get commission from that, and he charges a fee to the tenant as well.

[Erica]
Yep, and on the mental health side of things, he touches on burnout, how to catch it, what to watch for.

[Mattias]
Yeah, so it’s a great episode, so yeah, strap in and stay tuned. Without further ado, here’s Andy Coleman. Welcome back to the REI Agent.

We’re here with Andy Coleman. Andy, thanks so much for joining us.

[Andy Coleman]
Oh, thank you so much for having me.

[Mattias]
Out of always warm and always sunny Florida.

[Andy Coleman]
Yes, yeah, South Florida, you know, the nice, lovely Boca Raton.

[Mattias]
Love it, love it. Andy, you have a unique niche in real estate. Do you want to explain that first, or do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Or get into how you got into real estate?

[Andy Coleman]
Absolutely, look, look, so I am working with renters, and you know, when everybody hears that, they’re like, oh my God, you’re wasting your time, you’re not gonna make any money doing that, but I’m making over $650,000 every year, and I just started real estate five years ago. So I want to go back into how I got into this, why I chose rentals to begin with, because it’s pretty interesting. I had just moved to South Florida, maybe two years prior to getting my real estate license, back in like 2017, got my license basically 2020, and I was trying all the traditional methods, you know, working with buyers and sellers, but nothing was happening.

I mean, I was doing the open houses, I was doing cold calling, door knocking, I was trying everything, but I couldn’t get a sale under my belt, and I was blowing through all my savings. And before this, I was working at a call center making $10 an hour, but when I started working with the renters, I started making, I think I calculated it the other day, I got up to $733 an hour for my time, you know, which is a big difference from 10 bucks an hour just two years prior to getting a real estate license. So I basically did a system, a strategy, where I would generate warm rental leads, that’s kind of what I call it, because I don’t have to cold call anybody, and the people, the tenants that are reaching out to me, they want my help, they’re specifically reaching out about a particular property.

And I’m gonna go into my strategy on how I was generating 200 free leads a day. We’re talking 6,000 leads a month, you know, that’s how I built my business of closing hundreds of deals a year as a solo agent, and it was all off of Facebook Marketplace, not Facebook ads, you know, it was literally Facebook Marketplace, 100% free leads, and I was generating a boatload of them. I still do it today, I got a couple other new strategies that I’ve developed over time.

So let me take you back to 2020. When I was just getting started, we were entering into the pandemic, you know, and it was getting brutal. It literally switched over into a heavy seller’s market pretty fast.

So as a brand new agent with no network, no sphere of influence, I didn’t have any mentors or anybody helping me out, I needed a different kind of way to generate income, because I was blown through all of my money, and I didn’t like that feeling of everybody telling me, you’re not gonna close a deal for nine months, it’s gonna be tough, you know, you have to struggle, it’s gonna be a lag business, and I’m like, oh no, why do I have to go through all of this? I just wanna help families out.

So I started posting properties on Facebook Marketplace. I’ll go into the whole entire strategy in a minute, but I started getting leads coming in. I mean, like every single day, I would be generating, like I said, hundreds of leads, and over the years, I developed systems and processes on how to convert those leads into clients of mine, and then convert those clients into closed deals.

So my first year of real estate was like this. It’s kind of cool. I made $80,000 in commission, okay, and I was barely working.

I mean, I’m talking, I was probably putting in five hours a day, you know, I was taking off Saturday and Sunday, I was turning my phone off at five o’clock at night, I was really half-assing it, you know what I mean? And I still did about 50 deals, and six of those were buyers. So I ended up turning six renters into buyers in my very first year, because there are methods.

I basically, I teach this to agents now on how to turn active renters into buyers, and then closed renters into buyers. It’s two completely different things. So then my second year of real estate, I was like, wait a minute, this is working.

Actually, it’s funny. I had a moment with my wife now. We just got married, actually.

She was my, thank you so much. She was my girlfriend back then, and we had a moment in my second year of real estate. We were in the shower, and she was like, like, Andy, I want you to make more money than me.

And I’m like sitting here wondering, what the heck did she just say to me? I got really offended at first. You know, a lot of people, especially if you’re a man, you know, hearing that from a woman, you feel like you’re letting them down, and you’re not living up to your potential, but that was it.

She actually told me that I was not doing everything I could be doing, because like I said, in my first year, I was barely working. I would go to the pool at two o’clock in the afternoon, because I’m in sunny South Florida. I would go play tennis with my buddies, you know, at 10 a.m. on a random Thursday. I wasn’t taking real estate serious, and she saw that I had something that was working. So I really got motivated from that point on. I had like an ah-ha moment, and my second year of real estate, I closed 160 deals, and about, I think, yeah, yeah, it was honestly like mind-blowing.

As a solo agent, and 10 of those were house sales, were buyers, were buyers. I think I got one listing, and then nine buyers out of that, and then the others were rental deals, you know, and I ended up making about $250,000 in net commission, because like I said, I was getting all my leads for free, so it wasn’t like I was going on Zillow Premier and spending $4,000 a month. I was spending $0 a month.

The only expenses I had was my gas money, and yes, I was driving around a lot doing showings, because at that time, I didn’t really know exactly how to do like my, I really do like an advanced system right now, where I’m doing pre-offers, and I’m not showing any properties whatsoever until they get accepted, which I’m gonna talk about. It’s honestly game-changing, because you don’t have to show 10 rentals to a single renter. Realistically, you don’t wanna show more than three rentals to a single renter.

I didn’t really learn that until my third year, which I’m gonna get into right now, because I closed 250 deals, and I made $510,000 in net commission as a brand new agent. In two years in the business, that was like going into my third year. Doing that, I became the number three agent in the world, and again, literally solo agent.

I had no TC, I had no VA, I had no showing agents, I had no team. It was all 100% just me, so I know it’s possible to close 250 deals in a year by yourself, which was equating to about 20 to 30 deals every single month. That’s what I did in my first three years as a solo agent by working with renters.

I made damn near $1 million.

[Mattias]
That’s crazy. That’s amazing. Yeah, so this is a different world for me a little bit.

We don’t really have a marketplace for earning a commission on rentals. In my market, we do with more commercial leases. However, residential, not so much.

So can you just maybe start us off with what the commission structure could be? An example, I know you’re not allowed to say exactly what it is. I know in commercial real estate, it might be that you sign a five-year lease, and you kind of get a commission split based off of the total lease amount.

Is it similar in the residential space?

[Andy Coleman]
Yes, I think you guys are in Virginia, and actually, it’s funny. I’ve taught a few agents in Virginia how to do this on the residential side, and believe it or not, it works over there, same as it works in my market here in South Florida. It works in like 99% of the markets.

It was like Alaska and Hawaii. It’s like the only two markets I’ve found so far, and I literally have agents in all other states in America and some different countries like Canada. But basically, I get about half a month’s rent commission, right, meaning let’s say a property was $3,000 single family, three bed, two bath.

I would get $1,500 for that property, but then I charge a $300, $400 transaction fee to the tenant. So the landlord, they’re paying me that half a month’s rent commission, which is obviously coming from the listing agent, because the listing agent will get a full month’s rent commission. So they’ll get that $3,000, and they’ll be able to choose how much they give to the tenant’s agent.

If they find the tenant, then they’ll keep both sides, which I actually teach agents now how to do that to where you can get your own rental listings, and then you can double edit. It’s very easy how to do it. But if you’re representing the tenant, because most agents don’t know how to do this, that’s why I was able to close 250 rentals, you know, and probably 10 or 15 sales that year in my third year of real estate, because I was able to get that half a month’s rent commission I was able to make half a million dollars.

If you’re in a state where, let’s say, you’re making $300, I think in your area, I’m almost positive you guys get anywhere from 30% to 50% of the full first month’s rent as a tenant’s agent, and then the listing agent, again, gets the one month in Virginia. So even worst case scenario, let’s just say hypothetically, you know, an agent’s only making $300 for a rental, the listing agent, maybe they’re getting half a month, maybe they’re getting a full month, and they’re like, you know what, I’m only gonna give the tenant’s agent $300. You could still make a good amount of money, because you could charge that $300 transaction fee or $400 transaction fee to the tenant.

So, you know, do the math. 300 bucks from the listing agent, and then 300 bucks from the tenant for the transaction fee, which just combined into your commission. You just walked away with $600, and guess what?

Like I said before, I’m doing anywhere from zero to three shown max per renter, that’s it. They will never see more than three properties, so I’m only spending one or two hours of my time per rental deal. So even at $600, and you’re spending two hours of your time, you’re making $300 an hour.

Like, that is pretty impressive to do with, you know, a simple real estate license, and you could do this in any state as a brand new agent. The real trick here is volume. Like, yes, if you’re only doing one or two rentals a month and making 600 bucks, you know, like worst case scenario.

Remember, you can make half a month’s rent commission, you can make $2,000, like I do right now. So if you do two of those in a month, you’re still making four grand. But if you’re making $300, and you know, you charge a transaction fee, and you do 10 of these in a month, you just walked away with $6,000.

And I’m talking worst case scenario, six grand, which is what, $72,000 per year. Now, it gets even cooler, because think about it, right? What happens to renters?

You guys probably know this. So, like I said before, there’s two different ways how to do it. What do your renters typically do, either, you know, right away, when they meet you, or in time?

[Mattias]
Well, my mind is going to them wanting to buy, maybe, or get another rental in the future. Is that what you?

[Andy Coleman]
They buy, they buy, they buy, they buy. Like here, there’s a stat on this. 50% of tenants eventually buy a home.

So, I basically can capture 30% of those tenants that are renting with me to buy a home. Now, there’s a smaller ratio for right now. Like, if you get, let’s say, 100 leads, and you get 10 of them under contract for rentals, you’re gonna actually turn one of them into a buyer.

It’s kind of mirroring the housing market right now. Like, I don’t know if you saw the stats, but there were four million houses that were sold, you know, for sale last year, in 2024, but there were 45 million rentals. So, there’s literally a 10 to one ratio of renters to buyers.

So, it works that way, you know, if you put this into practice, too. If you get 10 rentals closed, you’re gonna turn one of them into a buyer. So, you just tack on an extra 10, $15,000 in commission every single month by doing 10 rentals.

So, and it works, you know, if you do five a month, you know, in two months, you’ll get a buyer out of it. So, it doesn’t really matter, like, how much your commission is. Honestly, it doesn’t.

Like, even if you’re getting paid a small amount, doesn’t matter. If you’re getting paid a large amount, doesn’t matter. Like, great, you’re gonna make a little bit more money, but either way, you’re gonna get paid for bringing a tenant and then this way, you can get buyers out of it.

So, instead of just making $6,000 worst case scenario, you’re gonna make 16,000 or $21,000 for getting one buyer and 10 rentals in the worst case scenario, but that’s how I make 50,000 a month because if I do 20 rentals, right, and, you know, let’s just say I get a bad month and I only do one buyer out of it, but I get 20 rentals at 2,000 a pop, I make 40 grand off the renters and then I made another $10,000 off the buyer. That’s $50,000.

That’s how I became a millionaire in real estate within a few years, literally just doing that system. And then, like I said, 30% of your closed renters turn into buyers in the future. So, if you do 100 rentals, 30 of them will buy from you in a year, two years down the road, which is another, what, three, four, $500,000 per year tapped onto the rentals.

Agents don’t understand this. Like, literally, this works so well because if you think about it, right, like, every single agent is taught not to work with renters. So, you don’t have any competition out there.

The market has not been saturated. Like, a cold call and for sale by owner strategy has been done to death. Everybody does it right now.

They get 50, 60, 75 phone calls every single day. So, it doesn’t work. You might be able to get one or two sellers, maybe every like six, seven, eight months, but you can’t live off of that.

That’s why the rentals work so powerfully because you can actually get a lot of leads coming in every single day for free, then you convert those leads to clients, then you can convert those renters to buyers, and then eventually you’ll convert those buyers to sellers. It is literally the best system that I’ve ever thought of. And if anybody can think of a better system, I would do it.

I would switch.

[Mattias]
Yeah, it’s awesome. It makes a lot of sense, and having a great follow-up plan is definitely gonna be key there, too, staying in touch with people. Because some renters will be there for, you know, they’ll be there for many years.

So, like, keeping in touch with them is gonna be key.

[Erica]
I was curious, Andy, you were talking about, you know, like, when you first started, you had a lot of time on your hands because you weren’t working as much, even though you were making a good amount. As you, and then, like, hearing you talk about it, it sounds like things ramped up really quickly when you started to really, like, put your head down. And so I’m curious what your days, what your weeks ended up looking like.

Did you still have time on your hands? Did you ever get to the point where you felt like, oh my gosh, this is growing faster than I could have ever imagined? I don’t, I kind of have to keep up?

[Andy Coleman]
Well, everything, actually, yeah, I mean, yeah. It got to the point in my second year where I was like, I was overwhelmed. I mean, I was, it’s funny you said that because I was getting, like I said, 200 leads per day.

And in the beginning, when that started happening, I wasn’t able to handle that. I would have, I don’t remember this specifically, I would have weeks that would go by, like three weeks would pass, and I wouldn’t get to a single lead. So I’d have like, you know, 2,000, 3,000 leads just piled up, and I was like, oh my God, I just wasted all these leads.

Like, you know, then I would get back to them, my conversion rate would be super low. So eventually, you know, I started to really create, like, systems and processes, you know, behind that, and that’s when, in my third year of real estate, I was really able to scale to closing 250 deals because I started getting back to all my leads, and I started being a lot more efficient with my time. That’s when I started doing my, like, you know, zero to three showings.

That’s when I did my pre-offers, and that’s when I really got organized. I created spreadsheets, I had clipboards, I had, like, my Google Notes. I created, like, an assembly line system for, you know, the tenants, and then I created a follow-up system.

So everything became, like, seamless at that point in my third year of real estate, but the second year, when I closed about 160 deals, yeah, I mean, that was, like, shocking to me, and, I mean, I had never made that kind of money ever in my life before. I made a quarter of a million dollars just one year in the business by working with, like, renters of all things. So no, I didn’t think that was ever gonna happen.

I thought I was gonna use real estate as, like, a stepping stone. Like, I was always, like, very entrepreneurial when I was younger. It’s funny, I was selling Beanie Beans when I was, like, 10 years old.

I remember I would, like, you know, ride my bike to the convenience store down the road, and the clerk over there, they would always hold, like, the rarer Beanie Babies for me, because I was, like, a little kid and everything. But I would, he didn’t know this, but I would go and resell them on eBay. I was, like, 10 years old.

Like, the Princess Dianas and the Aerie Beanie Babies. I still remember this. And I was doing that from a young age.

So I always thought, like, when I got my real estate license, you know, a year, like, yeah, five, six years ago, whenever it was at this point, I was, like, wow, like, I’ll get into real estate. I’ll close a couple sales here and there. I’ll make a couple dollars, and then I’ll go open up a new business.

I had no idea it was gonna snowball into all of this, because today, like, that was my first three years of real estate. And then my last two years of real estate, in 2023 and 2024, that was a lot different. That was much different.

I had a completely different day and a completely different schedule. I was doing different things than my first three years. So I’ll explain kind of, like, how my days were structured for my first three years as a solo agent.

Then I’ll tell you what I’m doing now, because it is drastically different, and I don’t work nearly as much as I used to, and I’m making more money, which I’ll get into, because it’s kind of cool. So first three years, I basically would wake up in the morning, and I would start, like, you know, doing my lead generation, you know? And then I would start doing my follow-ups, and I would start, like, making sure I was trying to convert these leads into clients.

Then I would start, like, scheduling all of my showings out for the day. And then I would, like, go and do all my showings, you know, and I was skipping lunch. I didn’t have any time for lunch, because I was busting my butt, you know?

I was working, like, 12 hours a day. Some days I would work, you know, 16 hours in a day. And I got, I’ll tell you what happened.

There was a dire consequence of that. But it was awesome, because I was showing properties, and then I was putting in offers for properties, and I was following up with people. And I was, like, running around like a mad person, but I was closing deals, you know?

Because remember, my second year at Real Estate, I closed about 160 deals, which equated to about, what, like, 15 deals, I think, every month. I might have done the math, but it was something like 15 deals every single month. So every other day I was closing a rental deal, or, you know, every month I had a buyer.

So, like, I got really busy really quickly. And then my second year, that’s when I was, like, in overdrive. I mean, just complete, like, literally, 16 hours a day.

Here’s the problem with that, though. You could only do that for so long. And yes, I was, like, you know, drinking a lot of coffee, because I think stimulants are your friend, as long as they’re legal, you know what I mean?

Like, having a nice cup of coffee, or, you know, whatever your vice is, like, trust me, you know? Because if you’re, you know, at 10 o’clock at night, and you’re sitting there on the computer, typing away, putting in, you know, 30 offers, because that’s what I was doing. I was putting in anywhere from 10 to 30 offers every single day.

This is back in 2022, during the peak of the market, where some of these properties were getting, like, 50 offers. So I, not a lot of them were getting accepted. Completely different market right now.

It’s so easy to work with renters, and there’s never been more of them. But back then, you know, I was busting my butt, and the consequence of that was I burnt out. I burnt out pretty hard.

I remember this. It was 2000, and I think it was 2000, I think it happened twice, actually. In my third year, when I did close the 250 deals, and made half a mil, I basically burnt out the first two months.

I think it was January and February. I might, no, actually, no, I’m wrong. It was actually November.

It was, like, it was October and November, now that I remember. It was October and November where I burnt out hard, and I just could not handle it anymore. I had gone the entire year, from, like, January to October, just, like, nonstop, 16 hours of, you know, most days.

I would literally be going to bed at two o’clock in the morning, waking up at, like, six, seven, eight, you know, 8 a.m., like, whenever the heck I woke up, and I was just, like, instant, right to work, like, immediately, you know? And doing that really took a toll on my body, because I didn’t have the time to rest. I, like, I was barely spending any time with my girlfriend, now wife.

I’m barely spending any time with her. Friends, I completely cut off all of my friends. Like, I barely, well, my family wasn’t living here at this point.

They were up north in Connecticut, and then, eventually, the year after, they moved out to Florida, which is cool, but I had no time to do anything but work. The thing is, though, I was obsessed over work. Like, I, and I was just doing one thing, so I became so good at just working with renters and turning renters into buyers that that’s what I became known for, and I had no choice but to succeed, because that’s all I was focused on.

I mean, truly, I was obsessed over it, but, you know, it worked, because I entered into the top 1% of earners worldwide by doing that within, you know, in a couple of years, in a brand new career. So, yes, there are sacrifices that you have to make. If you want to reach the top that quickly, and, you know, start earning over half a million a year, you must work 12, 16-hour days nonstop in the beginning of your career.

You have to. There’s no way around that. Otherwise, it’ll take you a decade to get there, because there are people like me out there that are doing that, and you will actually burn out if you’re not taking any time for yourself.

So, the year after that, I actually kind of addressed that, because I was like, I can’t really, you know, keep doing this and burning out for one or two months and, you know, being miserable for, you know, days on end sometimes, and I would just have to push through it anyways. So, I kind of found, like, a happy balance where I would wake up, and I wouldn’t look at my phone for the first, like, you know, two hours of the day, and I would just do, like, me time. Like, I would go to the gym.

I would exercise. Like, I would drink my coffee. I would, like, learn some new skills, like in communication or sales skills or whatever I wanted to do, and then by, like, eight o’clock at night, that was it.

It was, like, cutoff time. You know, like, I can eat dinner at 6.30, you know, with my, I think she was my fiancee at that point, I can’t remember, and then I would, like, go back to work for an hour, but then I would have a hard cutoff at, like, eight o’clock where I was like, okay, we’re done. Like, I’m done working right now, up until, like, 10 o’clock, you know, or 10.30 or 11 o’clock, however long I needed to kind of, like, recharge my batteries for the day. Then I would choose. Like, if I had a lot to do, I would go back to work for, like, an hour or two, you know, or I would, like, you know, rest more or, like, go to bed early and wake up early, and that was my fourth year of real estate, and when I started doing that, I noticed that I didn’t really have, like, a crazy burnout. I think I did still have a burnout that year.

It’s so hard to remember, but I think it was, like, a lot shorter. Maybe it only lasted, like, two weeks because I still was working, like, 12 hours a day, just not 16 hours a day, which does make a difference, and I was, you know, kind of, like, taking a little bit more time for myself, and it was good because I started to leverage my time, right, I think that’s the best way to put it because I started creating teams, and I would have, like, agents that were helping me do things. Like, I wasn’t doing, you know, really not many showings anymore for myself.

Like, I started getting showing agents, and then I trained a few agents, and I was taking, like, a commission split from them, so I was doing a couple of deals here and there in my fourth year of real estate, but not as much, and I was leveraging other people’s time because they were newer agents. They didn’t have that kind of, like, you know, idea that I had. They didn’t have that same drive, so for them, like, for me to give them leads and teach them what to do and give them direction and be on the phone with them, like, mentoring them, it was a big help, and it was also a big help for me because I got a lot of my time back.

So that was my fourth year of real estate. I still did well. I believe I made that year in my fourth year around, like, $550,000, $600,000, and I worked less because I was leveraging other people.

So you don’t have to do this, you know, alone forever, but if you are doing it alone, which I highly recommend any agent, you know, right now that’s trying to succeed in this 2025 housing market, you got it because you have to learn when you train other agents if they’re doing a good job or not because you won’t know if you haven’t mastered something first, and then they’re not going to take you serious because you have no credibility built up. So I wouldn’t trade my first three years for an end.

I feel like if I had to go back and do it all over again, I just would have worked harder my first year, you know? Like, I would have just, like, went all in right away, and I still would have done the exact same thing. Maybe taken a couple breaks here and there, you know, so I didn’t burn out that hard, but I really, I would have done the same thing all over again because now I’m at the point where I have, like, 10 agents that are helping me with my deals.

I got a team of agents with eXp, really, you know? I think I have, like, 30 agents on my eXp team, plus some individual agents, like, locally helping me. And now I got, like, I have two YouTube channels.

I got a whole Instagram page, and now I coach agents. I have, I coached 400 agents in the past year or so, and some of these agents are making 50 grand a month. Like, no joke.

Like, I interviewed one of my best students, Charlie. He made $47,000 in his third month after learning how to do this. For me, my first agent I taught, it was actually one of the agents that I was mentored back in, it was 2023ish or something like that.

He made 250 grand his first year, you know, by working with renters. And I’ll tell you, anybody can do it. Like, any single agent out there can copy exactly what I did, because nobody’s working with the renters.

You don’t have any competition from your fellow colleagues. You’re going to master one niche. And I actually have five different ways to make money by working with the renters.

[Erica]
Did you want to hear about those, or did you have any questions about what I just- Before we get into that, I wanted to go back to what you, the burnout you were talking about, because I think that is such a common experience in, I mean, in every job, but particularly yours. And I think, I mean, burnout is such a sneaky thing. It shows up and you often don’t really know what’s happening until it’s going to hit you full in the face.

And it’s a really easy thing to look back on and recognize what it was. But can you talk a little bit about what burnout looked like for you, or maybe what other people might pay attention to if they’re noticing similar things?

[Andy Coleman]
Oh, yeah. So, like, I don’t think the human body is designed to work 16 hours a day. I just don’t.

Even if you go back to, like, caveman days, we would go out there on hunting expeditions for a couple of days at a time, maybe then bring it back. And then we would relax for a while. We weren’t, like, busting our behinds every single day.

So I really feel like it’s in our DNA that when you’re doing something like that, you really start to feel it after- Everybody’s different. It could happen after a couple of months for some people. It could take years for other people.

It’s really different based on the person. For me, I was really able to do it, second year, I worked fairly hard. And then third year, I just went crazy.

And I think I lasted about eight or nine months or so before it really hit me. And I just remember when I was going to bed, I would be just drained, exhausted, but I wasn’t getting enough sleep. And I had so much stress and anxiety because I had so much on my plate.

I mean, if I was dealing with 60, 70 clients at once, literally, I had a whole rolodex of 70 clients. And I was working with at one time. So my phone was constantly blowing up.

I was getting texts and emails, hundreds of texts and emails every single day. And I just got to the point where it was starting to really stress me out. I would feel that dread in the pit of my stomach.

And it was kind of like- It wasn’t like- It was different because I was making good money. So it wasn’t that kind of feeling where you’re hopeless. It was more of an overwhelmed feeling for me because there is different kinds of burnout.

Because if you’re doing something and it’s not working, then it’s a much different feeling than if you’re doing something and it’s working. So I wasn’t complaining back then. I was like, what was me?

I’m making a lot of money and I’m super busy. Like, oh, poor me. Like, no, I wasn’t doing that, honestly.

I was more like, this is just hard work. And I kept telling myself over and over again, this will be worth it. If you keep this up, you don’t have to do this forever.

I would look in the mirror and I’d be like, Andy, just a little bit longer. Just get to this one point. For me, I wanted to hit 250 deals closed.

I wanted to make half a million dollars in one calendar year, just to prove it was possible and to basically cement my legacy in the real estate space. I truly think I did more deals than any human alive. Rental deals in a calendar year.

As a solo agent, I’m almost positive. I set a Guinness Book of World Records for that. And that was my motivating force to keep pushing forward.

But it did have its limits because I remember one day waking up and I’m like, I’m not doing anything. I think this was back in October of that year. After eight or nine months of this, I was like, I’m not doing anything today.

I’m like, I’m shutting my phone off. I can’t handle this. I don’t care about my deals.

I don’t care if I have a closing today. I don’t care. I’m done.

I can’t handle it anymore. And that’s when I kind of went on a hiatus for a good solid two months or so, where I remember even, I went to EXP Con. Yeah, I’m a four-time icon agent.

I win these awards with EXP. So I fly to Vegas and they present me on stage and all that cool stuff. And I remember, I was like, this is the perfect time.

I’ll go to Vegas. I’ll bring my fiance and we’ll have a good time. And I remember just barely working.

I took it down to a level where I was maybe only closing five or six deals a month. I think those two months, I only closed maybe 15 deals total. Whereas before, I was closing 20 to 30 deals a month.

So I know five or six might sound like a lot, but when you’re closing 20 to 30 a month, going to five or six is like a vacation. You’re like, at that point, you’re like, I’m barely even working. But I couldn’t stop 100%.

I did that. I’ll tell you this. Back in the day when I was younger, I was maybe 19, 20 years old.

I was running a business back then. And I remember working hard just like this. But it would be for maybe six months at a time.

Wasn’t nearly as hard, maybe eight hours a day. And I was younger, obviously. But I was making decent money.

I think I was bringing in 10, 15 grand a month. Back then, for a 20-year-old, it was kind of cool. But I would build up maybe $100,000 in savings, right?

And just cash in the bank. And I would be like, OK, I’m done. I would quit.

I would just be like, I’m going to stop, completely stop, where I was doing nothing for a year at a time. And I would just live off of my savings until I got the itch and urge again to start up and start the business back up again. I had a kind of business that was allowing me to do that.

But I didn’t want to do that this time. And when I got my real estate license, I made a promise to myself, don’t do that again. Do not repeat your old behaviors.

Because I got comfortable. I got satisfied with a little bit of money that I was making and managed to save up. And I was like, don’t need to work anymore.

And I’ll tell you this right now. I have agents that I train and teach that do the exact same thing tonight. And believe it or not, some of them are older.

Some of them are younger. So I don’t think it matters about age. Some of them, this is the funniest story.

So I taught this one agent. I won’t say his name because I’m about to talk a little bit of shit. But he ended up closing 15 deals in one month, OK?

After like two months of learning from me. Made like $30,000, $40,000 in one month. And guess what happened his next month?

Guess what he did? He went on vacation. He went on vacation.

He stopped. He stopped doing real estate. He was like, and I asked him.

I’m like, hey, man. Because I was giving him leads at the time, really helping him out. He was getting his own leads.

He was doing a combination. I’m like, dude, I haven’t heard from you. I’m like, you’re not responding to me.

Like, would it ignore me for like five days, six days at a time? And I’m like, dude, what’s going on? He’s like, oh, yeah, I took this month off.

I’m like, what? I mean, you had such insane momentum going. I’m like, what do you mean you took this month off?

He’s like, yeah, yeah. I’ve never made this much money in my life. I’m good.

I’m good for a month or two. I’m like, I don’t need to work now. I’m like, dude.

I’m like, it’s just like, it’s funny to me because I recognize that because I used to do that. But that’s what separated me now, nowadays, in my 30s. My 30s now, because I’m 38 years old now.

That’s what separates my older self from my younger self. When I was in my 20s, I had the exact same behavior. But I was never able to strive for that crazy success where you can basically do anything you want.

Because I don’t know if you guys are following the economy right now, but it’s a bad place. And the whole economy was designed for $70,000 a year of income. So I would say double that.

If you make $150,000 a year or $200,000 a year, you can kind of do anything you want. You don’t have to worry about rent or groceries or anything like that. But to get to that point, it’s extremely difficult because it involves consistency.

That agent that made the $30,000 or $40,000 in a month, they’re probably not going to make a quarter of a million dollars in a year because they’re going to make a little bit of money. They’re going to take a couple months off, make a little bit of money. So they might only make six figures, like low six figures.

And you still have to worry about bills at that price point. So that’s the difference between being somebody that really wants to become one of the top 1% earners in the country. And reaching that kind of success is consistency.

It’s easy to make a lot of money. Honestly, honestly, anybody can do it. Anybody can make $50,000 in a month.

Honestly, it’s really not that hard to do that. The hard part is maintaining that every single month consistently for years on end. That’s the really difficult part that nobody talks about because making a lot of money is easy.

There’s a ton of money out there to go around for everybody. All you have to do is niche down, learn one thing, obsess over it, work really hard for a long period of time, and you will make a lot of money. But the thing is trying to do that over and over and over again and then scale it through.

That’s the difficult part that I finally figured out in my 30s.

[Erica]
Yeah, that is the challenging part. And the two things I want to pull out from what you just said was one, burnout is often a very physical experience and can show up. You mentioned that feeling of dread in your gut.

And for some people, it can turn into panic attacks. And it can be like brain fog and irritability. And it just tends to be such a physical thing where you feel like you physically cannot go on anymore in the way that you have.

But you also paired with that, though, it’s also really tough, especially in those difficult times, to stay motivated rather than to just give up and do something different, which is what a lot of people do where they change careers or they take some time off. But what you’re saying, too, is it’s incredibly difficult. You have to be super disciplined to stay focused and to focus on growth, in which it sounds like you have done both and you’ve done so well.

And I know you had mentioned, too, you had some strategies you wanted to talk about, too, before we wrap up, right?

[Andy Coleman]
That’s right. I guess it’s like, you know, might as well hear what I actually did, you know, to become this successful. And I still do it to this day.

I’ll be honest, I don’t close that many deals anymore. You know, I probably close, I’m back to doing like five deals a month, give or take, you know, maybe a couple of buyers or sellers and, you know, a few rentals here and there because I got a whole bunch of agents helping me, which is great because everybody’s happy. I make a couple bucks.

They make a lot of bucks, you know, so everybody wins because I’m with eXp Realty. So I get the rev share, you know, so it’s pretty cool experiencing that. And I just capped again and I’m about to icon for my fifth time, which is really cool.

But I am not really doing the same kind of like personal volume. My team is, but I’m not doing a personal volume. So let me kind of explain my five ways to make money with renters.

And if anybody is like really interested, you know, you could always check out my website, dredgerentals.com or my YouTube channel, Andy Coleman, go and check it out. I have two channels, Andy Coleman Real Estate and then Original. Five ways to make money in my rental system.

Let me break this down for y’all. First way is MLS strategy. That’s what I call it.

It’s basically your single families, your townhomes, your duplexes, your condos. And condos are different from apartment complexes because I will show you my second way, which is the easiest one you’re ever going to make in your life doing apartment locating. But you basically want to advertise another agent’s rental listing with permission, of course.

Now you’re going to put this up on various different platforms. One of the free ones is Facebook Marketplace. You could literally get 100 leads coming in a day.

I still get 100 leads every day right now. I don’t get 200 anymore. I get about 100 per day.

And my agents help me with them now. But once you do that, you’ll get tenants reaching out about that particular property. Now your job is to convince them to work with you and be loyal to you and to basically close that deal.

That’s where it does become a little bit challenging because anybody can put a property on a Facebook Marketplace and get leads coming in, but it’s knowing what to do with them and then actually getting them to the finish line and then doing volume, doing 10 of these, 15, 20 of these a month. I got a lot of students right now that are closing three deals a month, but I got a lot more students that are closing 10 deals a month or 15 deals a month. They’re all learning the exact same strategy.

So what’s the difference? The difference is how they’re applying it. And like you said before about being disciplined, if they’re not disciplined, it doesn’t matter what you know, you’re not going to make any kind of real leeway or headway in the real estate space or any business for that matter because you’re not doing the things that you need to that other people are.

I just heard this agent the other day talk about turning your phone off at five o’clock at night and not answering the phone on Saturday and Sunday. They were like, yeah, you don’t have to do that. It’s actually a bad thing.

And I’m sitting here like, oh my God, agents are hearing this because it was a big social media influencer for real estate. And I’m like, agents are hearing this and thinking they don’t have to do that. And in one mind, I’m like, that’s great because that just like really eliminates my competition because if an agent does that, they will never beat me in a million years.

But then I had another agent DM me and they were like, because I made a reaction video to that. They were like, oh my God, I completely agree with you and disagree with what they said. I actually turned my phone on on a Sunday and I got back to the lead right away instead of ignoring them.

And the lead ended up being a buyer and they were like, the buyer said, I’m gonna work with you over my other agent that I’ve been working with for a few months now because they don’t answer me back on Sunday and they take hours to respond to me. So he’s like, that works. So like that kind of discipline, it really will separate other agents even if you know the strategies that I’m talking about right now, which is, I’m gonna go back to, I got a little sidetrack, MLS properties, right?

You have thousands of these or hundreds of these in your MLS right now. And if you advertise them, I’m telling you, you will get a flood of leads reaching out to you about them. And then all you have to do is basically set up the showing and put an offering for that property and then just rinse and repeat, right?

I don’t wanna really go into details. There’s like, there’s a ton of things you have to do to close 15 of these a month, but that’s the basic way on how to get leads and how to make anywhere from $600 at the minimum you’ll ever make all the way up to $10,000. I’ve made $10,000 on a rental before.

So I’m just talking about my personal experience. One of my agents, he just made 40 grand off a rental. It was an $80,000 rental, one-year lease.

Something like a multimillionaire that got this, he made $40,000 on a rental. I’ve never done that, but he did. That’s my MLS strategy.

Now, second way to do it, and I swear to God, I am like, I am not bluffing right now. It’s the easiest money any human being can make in real estate. All you have to do is advertise an apartment complex with permission, of course, from the apartment complex.

And again, there’s two ways to do this. You could do a real strategy where you’re doing like short little 20-second clips and putting them on Instagram and TikTok and getting like a Google leads forum and DMs and your phone number and email where you’re getting inbound leads that way. Or you could do a Facebook marketplace approach where you’re taking the pictures and putting them on marketplace.

And you gotta be really careful not to expose the property, which I’ll talk about in a second. But this way, you’ll have apartment locating companies reaching out to you wanting to see that complex. All you have to do is show the property.

You don’t have to do the rescreening. You don’t have to do the deposit. You don’t have to do the final walkthrough, the application.

You’re not doing any of that. The apartment complex is doing all that, which is the most mind-blowing thing imaginable because they’ll pay you a referral fee and it could be anywhere from 500 bucks all the way up to a full month’s rent. So if the apartment complex was a too bad, too bad, that was $3,500, some of these apartment complexes, especially if they’re brand new, they’re gonna pay you $3,500 for maybe 30 minutes of work.

45 minutes of work, that’s it, right? It’s the easiest money anybody could possibly hope to make in a renter’s market today, right? So that’s the two ways on working with tenants to make money with rentals.

Now, there’s three more ways. One is in landlord leads. This is super powerful because you can get landlords to give you their rental listing.

And I have multiple different methods on how to do this and how to generate at least 50 leads every single day, at least, actually more, just from landlords. And then if you get that rental listing, they will pay you a full month’s rent commission. Worst case scenario, you’re getting half a month’s rent commission, but 90% of the market out there, depending where you are, you’re gonna get a full month’s rent commission.

So if the property’s four grand, you will make four grand on that deal if you double end it, which I break down and show you just how to do that. Now, the benefit for this is it’s not the four grand. I mean, that’s cool, making a full month’s rent commission.

The real benefit here is getting leads coming in from that rental listing because now you have your own. You’re not getting permission to advertise it. This is your own.

While doing a combination of all of the other two strategies, you’re gonna get more leads coming in because you’re gonna cycle it back into my MLS strategy and my apartment complex strategy from all those extra leads that you’re getting from syndicating that property on the MLS. It’s gonna blast out everywhere. This way, you will have 200 leads coming in every single day.

You’ll be working with tenants for MLS properties. You’ll be working with tenants from apartment complexes and you’ll be working with landlords getting rental listings. Now, the last two ways to do this is insane because you can turn renters into buyers today and tomorrow.

Two ways to do this. Fourth way is basically turning an active renter into a buyer right now. At about a one to 10 ratio, I’ve had agents do better than that.

I’ve had agents do worse than that. So I like to say about 10%, right? So if you close 10 rentals, you will get one buyer out of it if you do specific things.

If you don’t do anything, that’s not gonna happen. I got agents that aren’t getting buyers. And then I got agents that are getting two buyers a month because they’re going hard on that, you know?

And they’re spending $0 for that buyer because they’re all coming from free rental leads. You are basically just convincing a renter now that reaches out about one of these rental properties to buy a house instead of rent a house. And like I said, one out of 10 for that.

So that’s the fourth way to make money. That’s big money. We’re talking anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000 extra every single month on average, just from the buyers.

That’s, I don’t know why every agent’s not doing this. Then the fifth way to do it, it involves a little bit of patience and discipline and it involves a little bit of planning. This way, you can get 30% of your closed renters to turn into buyers in the future.

I’m talking one, two, three years down the road, whatever it is, especially when the market switches back to a buyer’s market because trust me, it’s coming. Within two years, we’re gonna be in a heavy buyer’s market. The inventory is gonna be a lot higher.

The prices are dropping right now. Prices are crashing today, right now. Guess what?

The Fed is gonna start lowering the interest rates, right? The tender treasury yield probably will start going down around that time, is my anticipation. The mortgage rates are gonna be lower.

When the prices have stabilized and the inventory is back higher than pre-pandemic level, and then they start dropping the rates back to like four and a half, five percent, give or take, you are gonna have 10 million buyers, 15 million buyers enter into the market wanting to buy a home. If you close a lot of reps between now and then, if you really capitalize on this market that we have today, you can turn 30% of them into buyers. So do the math.

If you do 200 rentals, that’s 60 buyers that you’re gonna get in about two years from now. Every single year, 60 buyers times what? 10,000 commission, that’s $600,000 that you can start making almost immediately with a little bit of patience.

Plus you can actually make a ton of money in the meantime by working with the renters on the four other strategies that I just talked about. That’s the five ways to make money. And then the sixth way is turning your buyers into sellers.

That’s like five, six, seven years down the road. Nobody wants to hear about that. Everybody wants to have money right now, but technically there is six ways to make money off of renters.

And nobody knows how to do this.

[Mattias]
I love it. I love it. I feel like that’s five golden nuggets, but I’m curious if you have another golden nugget you’d like to share with our listeners.

[Andy Coleman]
Yes. Okay. So I want to say this, right?

The riches are in the niches, okay? So if anybody doesn’t know what a niche is, it’s a, I’ll probably mispronounce it. It’s a niche, a niche, you know, a niche.

Basically in real estate, you have to generate leads every single day. No, I’m not talking about your sphere of influence. That does not count.

Every single person, every single agent should be working with their sphere of influence and network. Like no matter what, that’s a subsidiary method of generating leads, right? Because that’s your network.

You have to pick some kind of method. Like, listen, I don’t care if it’s my rental strategy or if it’s doing door knocking or if it’s sitting open houses or if it’s cold calling Fizbo’s or if it’s sending out mailers. I don’t care what it is, honestly.

I mean, if you analyze the market, you would see that it’s a renter’s market. So why not work with the renters but to each their own, do whatever you want. As long as you’re just focusing on one niche only, you do not want to be door knocking while you’re working with renters, while you’re going after luxury listings, while you’re trying to be a social media influencer to get buyers.

If you do all four of those at the same time, you will fail miserably. You trust me on that. It’s literally impossible.

Nobody can do it. You have to pick one niche if you want to be successful, right? I’m not talking about making 70,000 a year.

You know, if you want to be poor, go ahead. You know, do all four things. Don’t focus on anything.

And you could be poor and broke. Like that’s fine by me. But if you want to be successful, you must do one thing only and become the best at it.

And then basically focus all of your energy, obsess over that one thing and you will have no choice but to succeed. That’s a guarantee and a promise.

[Mattias]
I love it. I love it. What about a fundamental book you think everybody should read or one that you just are currently enjoying?

[Andy Coleman]
Ooh, there is a new book. So here, so there’s three people that are super influential that I like to read and like listen to on like, you know, podcast and YouTube and everything. They’re all authors.

One of them is Alex. I’m going to give you three because this is really important. One of them is Alex Formosy.

Everyone that wants to be an incredible salesperson, listen to Alex Formosy. Go get his book. I think it’s called a hundred million dollar leads and then a hundred million dollar.

Yeah, yeah. He’s got two books right now. He’s writing the third one right now.

Incredible mind blowing. Honestly, like it’s all about sales, right? Because obviously when you’re doing real estate, you’re never selling the home.

You’re selling yourself. And Alex will teach you how to sell yourself better than anybody. Then there’s another person.

His name, I might be butchering this, it’s Vin Jian. He’s an Asian guy and he’s incredible. I mean, he is just like through the roof on communication skills.

Like I’m talking, you will, you don’t even understand that you’re a terrible communicator. I didn’t understand. I was a terrible communicator.

Everybody is a terrible communicator compared to this guy. And that’s what gets you business. That’s what gets people to like you.

I’m still learning every single day how to communicate properly. Vin Jian. I don’t remember his book off the top of my head, but you have to listen to him.

If you want to learn communication skills, because trust me, it’s like inflection of your voice, you know, it’s decibel levels. It’s altering your pitch and tone and your frequency. Like there’s so many things that, you know, being warm and friendly, like there’s so many things you have to learn about communication so you can actually get people to stay loyal to you and want to work with you instead of like, you know, not good, like not working with you and going to a different agent.

And then there’s just one more lady. I can’t remember her name. She was just on Cody Sanchez podcast.

Cody Sanchez is awesome too. But this particular lady, she just came. The book is called, I actually just took a screenshot of it.

Typically, I wouldn’t do this, but I think I have it pulled up right here. Here it is. I found it.

It’s Cues. It’s Cues by Vanessa Van Edwards. I actually just ordered this book.

I was listening to the audio version of it and I had to buy this book. So Cues, I think that’s what it is. Master the secret language of charismatic communication.

Cues by Vanessa Van Edwards. I don’t know if anybody can see this right now, but you have to listen to her on YouTube if you want to learn how to communicate and present yourself better. Those are the three people, I think are a must, like absolute must that you have to listen to for sales and communication because anybody in business, I don’t care if it’s real estate or not, you have to learn those two skills.

If you don’t have those two skills, you will not be as successful as if you master them.

[Mattias]
Sure. And Andy, if anybody wants to reach out to you or learn more about your program for Rich with Rentals, where can they do so?

[Andy Coleman]
Yes, absolutely. Thank you for bringing that up too. So anybody can go to www.richwithrentals.com.

I’m sure you guys will put it in the description for me. And then if you want to see me on YouTube, I have two YouTube channels. I have @AndyColeman.

That’s like my main channel where I talk about the housing market, which honestly, everybody should be on that learning because if you know about the housing market, you’re going to be able to help your clients better. Trust me, it’s honestly a game changer. And then my real estate channel, @AndyColemanRealEstate.

That is where I break down all of my strategies. That’s where I talk about how to do a CMA and open houses, tax, all the stuff that realtors really need to start making money. That’s on my second YouTube channel.

And if anybody wants to follow me on Instagram, it’s at @TheAndyColeman.

[Mattias]
Awesome. Well, Andy, thanks so much for being on the show.

[Andy Coleman]
Thank you guys so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

[Erica]
Thanks for listening to the REI Agent.

[Mattias]
If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to catch new shows every week.

[Erica]
Visit reiagent.com for more content.

[Mattias]
Until next time, keep building the life you want.

[Erica]
All content in this show is not investment advice or mental health therapy. It is intended for entertainment purposes only.