From Side Hustle to Hardcore Freedom-Building Success with Cory King

Transcript

[Mattias]
Welcome back to the REI Agent. We’re joined today by Cory King. Cory, thanks so much for joining us.

[Cory King]
Hey, what’s up? Thanks so much for having me on.

[Mattias]
We just started a really good conversation before we hit record, and I was like, let’s get this going, this is perfect.

Cory is like the poster child of this podcast. And so give us a bird’s eye view of all you do in real estate, who you are, and that kind of stuff.

[Cory King]
Yeah, man, thanks for the kind words. So yeah, so I serve as a real estate team lead here in Knoxville, Tennessee. I manage a team of about eight, including myself, a parent, three young boys.

And we also host a investor meetup here in our market. It’s got about 2,000 members of that community. And so I also do probably three or four fix-and-flips a year.

We’ve got a rental portfolio of about half a dozen single-family homes. And somehow I manage to juggle all of that.

[Mattias]
Yeah, that’s a lot. Cory, you mentioned off-air that you kind of got your license to help with the investing side. So tell us about how you got started in real estate, and I guess it was through investing.

What got you going?

[Cory King]
For sure, yeah. So really the intro to it all was just becoming a first-time home buyer when I was 22, way back in 2009. This is down in the east central part of Florida, like the Space Coast, Brevard County area.

And I would love to say I had the foresight in buying in 2009, and I was gonna be this wizard and all that. Honestly, it was all, I guess, ego and fear more than anything that drove me to that. So I quit high school senior year, got to working into restaurants full-time, worked my way up into management, and eventually became an owner-operator of my own place.

And as part of that journey, at 22 I was having a bit of an existential crisis in seeing some of my peers that had graduated college and were going on to different things. And I was in this like, dude, what do I have to show for myself at this point in life? And so for me, homeownership was the equivalency of a college degree of like, this is how I can show I’m doing something for myself.

100%, right? Great time to buy, didn’t quite have that. It was purely just on that, and it was like, I’m gonna be 100 grand in debt one way or the other.

So I guess a house makes all the sense in the world. And so I started house hacking before that was the term, just roommates, and it was two of my buddies that worked for me at my restaurant. Put them in there, I think my mortgage payment was probably around $800 a month, and I charged each of them $400 a month per bedroom, including utilities, and that was it.

It covered my expenses, I was in my 20s, I was never home, they were never home, so like, awesome, we never really even saw each other. Fast forward a little bit, I then started finding a, I don’t know, kind of like just a little side hustle. I’m a big comics nerd, collectibles nerd, so I was going to auctions down there in Florida, and I was going for like, and at these auction houses, there’s like cars and boats and tools and collectibles, and then real estate happened to trade at that.

So I would go there to flip comic books or tools and stuff like that, and then I started seeing real estate looking around, and they used car dealerships, so those guys were fighting over the cars. Real estate was the interesting one, and I was like, huh, there’s these vacant lots in subdivisions that were like halfway built, like all around Central Florida, and, because a lot of the builders, right, kind of went under in a crash, and so you had all this halfway built stuff, and I was like, huh, these lots are selling for like three grand, but I could look on Zillow and see that they’re selling for like eight to 10 still, so I’m like, there’s something there.

So it was like, just do my best with figuring it out. Google Earth wasn’t really a thing, so it was just like, on my day off from the restaurant, I could go out and drive through a subdivision and see like, okay, it’s a house, house, vacant lot, house, house, and so the first one was just the house between, or the vacant lot between two houses, it was like three grand, and then it, bought it, had the deed recorded, then went and talked to the owners, like on either side, and just like, knock on their door, hey man, like, I got this lot next door to you, thought I was gonna build, economy sucks, like, meh, you want it?

Like, you know, bring the Zillow printout. Zillow says it’s worth 10, like, will you take eight? And it was kind of like one of those, well, I don’t know, kind of him and haw, and then it was like, well, just, maybe I’ll go talk to the neighbor, and I was like, whoa, hold on a second, like, honey, come here, right?

And just like, hashed it out and got the first one, and that was like, all I needed to understand, like, there’s a little arbitrage here, and that got me more interested in real estate and understanding like, oh, I can kind of trade paper a little bit here, I mean, granted, I still had to buy the lot, but like, it was a neat little hustle, so I did that for a couple years, like, go to an auction, buy a couple lots, and go flip them out, and like, that was neat, like, that’s what got me into it, so, fast forward a little bit further, like I, you know, was owner-operator of a restaurant for seven, eight years, and had then met my wife while she was in grad school, she had zero desire to stay in Florida, and I was, had hit kind of a ceiling of achievement, it felt like, so, I was like, well, I can sell off a good chunk of this, so I have a small ownership stake in that business, but selling my house, selling a chunk of that business allowed me and my wife to relocate here, and then it was, well, all right, I don’t really wanna be in restaurants, I had friends that had been, had, you know, left being bartenders or servers and gotten into real estate, so, for me, I could look at them, like, well, dude, they could do it, like, surely I can do this kind of deal, right? So, yeah, so I just got my license then, this is late 2018, at that point, got my license here in Knoxville, and just went, like, off to the races, really starting to do it for myself, like, kind of my own self-dealing, helping that out, and then started working with clients, and then started really finding the investor niche, and working with other investors, and that’s where, like, the light bulb went off, for me, honestly, was understanding that I had to have, I had to have a cash machine, like, I’ve gotta be able to do business here, as an agent, to have money to then go invest into my, like, wealth machine, so to speak, right? So, through that discovery and recognizing, like, huh, there’s really not an agent or a team in this area that, like, specifically focuses on the investor niche, like, there’s not that go-to spot that, like, oh, I could just plug in here and everything can unlock. I was finding investors were having to, oh, I gotta find my agent, then I gotta find a contractor, then I gotta find the right title company, then I gotta find the right lender, and so, for me, the aha was, like, what if I just become that person for that?

Oftentimes, the agent is the central node in a lot of that, you know, those dealings, and so, if I can just be the super connector and, like, the conduit for somebody, it makes it infinitely easier to not only, like, support clients in-state, but also, like, the out-of-state investor where they could just, like, plug into us and everything unlocks for them.

[Mattias]
I love it. There’s so many things to unpack in your story so far. There’s, I wanted to touch really quick on that whole, like, the wealth versus, like, the cash kind of, like, machines, because I think that’s something that, you know, people on the outside, they might hear your, like, you know, portfolio of, you said 12 single families, right?

[Cory King]
Like, I mean- Six, we got half a dozen.

[Mattias]
Okay, well, yeah, anyway, so, like, you know, six, 12, whatever it might be, you know, people might see that and be, like, okay, that’s, dude’s, like, you know, like, if you own your own house, maybe not even that yet, you might be, like, dude’s killing it, right? But, like, you know, a lot of that stuff is a long-term play, like, that stuff is, the majority of my net worth is my rental portfolio.

The majority of my income is my real estate sales.

[Cory King]
Yeah.

[Mattias]
And they are, and what I like to teach here is that those are two awesome pieces of the pie that you kind of need both in. And so, yeah, why not invest in the thing that you sell? I think a lot of agents don’t.

But we, you know, we should know the market really well that we’re working in, right? And it’s easy to buy in the market that you’re working in because you understand it well. So you come across a deal that might need some rehab or whatever it is.

I was gonna ask you about that as well, if you’ve been doing, like, the BRRRR method, because if you’re flipping properties, you’re probably wanting to keep a couple of those and just kind of refinance out, which we have done as well. But yeah, so like, I mean, there’s opportunities out there. And if you’re not, we don’t have the retirement account in a corporation.

You know, we kind of have to create it for ourselves. And so I think, I mean, why not real estate? You can access it now, you get tax advantages now, you’re a real estate professional, all that stuff.

So I just spit out a lot, but is that the method you’re doing? Are you going through, like, the BRRRRs to pick up the single families?

[Cory King]
Yeah, 100%. I mean, you nailed it, right? Like, you’ve got to have some kind of business or some kind of income stream that is feeding the machine that you’re living off of that supports itself.

And then you can then take those funds and go invest. And that becomes, like, the passive about it, you know? You still gotta manage it all.

But like, it’s just a spot for it to go park cash that you believe in as an agent. Yeah, you definitely have access to more information than maybe the general public typically doesn’t. You understand market trends a lot faster than people do.

You know what areas are turning over or changing around, like, where the opportunities are that you can certainly take advantage of it. And you might as well, like, use that. And you’re right, it is very much a long-term game.

Like, I’m playing the, I’m planning for when my little kids are, when my wife and I become empty nesters, which is still 15 years out kind of thing for us, right? But I’m playing that game. And so a lot of my portfolio’s focused on buying in strategic areas, going with some good strategies for us.

We’re in a college town, so some of our portfolio is student rentals that those trend really, really well for us. And yes, we do the BRRRR strategy. It’s not always where we get, I’ve had deals where I’ve not been able to get, like, all of my money out of it.

And I think you have to be okay with that. Like, I am. You know, I rationalize it in the sense of, all right, like, even if I left, let’s say 20 grand, like, in a project, 20 or 30 grand, which I’ve left as much as, like, 60 in some before.

Ultimately, I can still go, like, all right, man, but I just effectively now have a property that I put, like, 10% down on, you know? And it’s turnkey, and it’s cash flowing, and it’s all that, and it’s gonna pay itself down. That’s cool for me.

I’m good with that. It’s like a forced piggy bank for myself to have our rentals as. So yeah, the BRRRR strategy is definitely one that we employ.

[Mattias]
And I was, just to add to what you’re saying there, I’ve heard a number of people say that, and it almost seems like it’s, like, they’re a little embarrassed to say that they haven’t done, like, all of them 100% BRRRRs, but, like, yeah, like you’re saying, like, I mean, you get a way better deal. You’ve got a property that’s freshly renovated, so it’s, like, in really good condition, hopefully. And at the end of the day, too, you could decide to sell it.

Like, so, like, you still have equity there that you’ve created. So, like, it’s, I think it’s, yeah, if it’s in a great location, like, it’s a better opportunity than just buying it without having done all that. So, definitely, I love those.

[Cory King]
Yeah, it helps me justify it, at least. You know what I mean? Like, I know that it’s cool if I leave a little cash into it.

It’s fine, you know? It’s just a forced piggy bank at the end.

[Mattias]
And I think there’s also nothing wrong with people just buying rentals, you know? Putting 20% down or whatever like that. Like, that’s still better than not doing anything.

I agree. Like, at some point, people, especially if they’re getting started, I think need to just take a step forward. And if that’s just a traditional, they’re not getting, playing advanced chess, that’s fine, like, you know?

[Cory King]
Yeah, it’s, I definitely recognize that getting into the business. Like, coming across agents that have been in the business for 20 years and they tell you that before they even tell you their first name, kind of thing, right? I think we’ve all met those kind of people.

And I look at some of them and I’m like, man, like, God, they’ve seen so many market cycles. And some are in comfortable positions. Like, they don’t necessarily have to do this business.

But man, I’ve come across more often than not like agents that have been in the business for like 20 plus years and they’re still like check to check. Like, they’re doing it because they have to do this. It’s like, man, I don’t want to be that person.

Like, I want to be in a spot where I’m, I’ve now been in business like my seventh year and I know that by year 10, I’m gonna have the option to do this from that point on. And that’s really the spot I wanted to put myself in and my family into is, hey, this is optional. If I want to keep doing like the sales thing, I want to make sure that we’ve secured the bag, so to speak, and we’re good for the future.

[Mattias]
100%. And then one other thing I wanted to add to, to rewind your story to the beginning, the thing I was thinking about was people might be like, well, if I could buy a lot for $3,000, I’d do that all day. But you gotta like, you gotta think about what that time was like.

It was mass fear with real estate, right? Like that was like, it wasn’t an easy decision to jump into real estate investing at that time. And so like, it’s always hindsight is 20, 20.

The best time to buy a house was 20 years ago or whatever. That’s always gonna be the case. And so like, that’s should be a key to you that you should be making progress now.

Like you should be working towards things now because it’s never gonna get better. I mean, real estate just does well over time. So like, it’s like a tree, like, you know.

[Cory King]
Yeah, man, if I could have held on to those, like look, I kick myself in the butt all the time. Like, man, I wish I would have held on to like 10 of those because now they sell for like 30 to 40 grand a piece and just like, it is what it is. It’s always 20, 20.

I, yeah, it was a risky move. I was just willing to bet on myself that I could do it because I was already, I was already flipping comic books and collectibles. And I just have always had that kind of little hot side.

I always had like a little side hustle, whether it was like the lemonade stand or this, like I always wanted something that I could do to create some additional cash. And so that was just, I was like, well, if I’m already flipping comic books or if I’m at this auction, like I’m buying the set of tools, you know, and I’m just driving like on my way home, I’m selling them at the pawn shop because it’ll cover my gas for this whole trip. Sure, like I was always willing to do that.

So for me, it was just another thing I could flip.

[Mattias]
Totally, I feel the same way. I mean, and I think definitely there are people that are more risk tolerant and more able to see the opportunity, or maybe it’s more just taking action on the opportunity really. But it’s same thing here.

Like it’s always been something that I’ve been churning on. And you know, if you’re not that way, it’s fine too. But I think you should analyze where you wanna be.

And there’s different forms of investments. Like I think another thing that like syndications, like having, investing into a syndication as a real estate agent makes a ton of sense. If you’re an accredited investor, maybe if not from your net worth, if you don’t have a ton of investments already, it might be from your income.

If you’re super busy and you don’t really want to manage rentals, even if you’re using a property manager, obviously you still have some sort of involvement in that, you should. Maybe a syndication would be a better route. But you know, there are opportunities of where to go kind of that might meet your style, your personality a bit more.

And again, help you not be that person that is having to work until they die.

[Cory King]
Yeah, 100%. You’re right. The coolest thing I’ve found with real estate is there’s just so many options to go with.

And certainly that can maybe paralyze some people, kind of the analysis paralysis, like which one do I go? And ultimately, I mean, you do have to just be willing to like bet on yourself and just pick something and just try it. You’re just not gonna know at the end of the day until you’re actually doing the thing.

There’s only so much you can read, listen, like study, practice, running things. And then eventually you’re just gonna have to, some of this is just learning like on the fly and rolling with the punches when they come.

[Mattias]
And to go back to your analogy with owning a house versus having student loans, I mean, how easily do people spend tens of thousands of dollars on an education? That how often do they also not use their education? Like, I think it’s valuable, don’t get me wrong, but I mean, I study psychology and that’s great.

And I worked in the field for a little bit, but I wouldn’t have had to be in the career I’m in now. And I think a lot of people I went to school with end up in completely different arenas than from what they studied. And I don’t think anybody would be like, it was not worth, there’s the culture, there’s experiences, the growth, there’s educating yourself.

All that to say though, is like, if an investment doesn’t go perfect, it’s very rarely a zero sum game, but it is a very good education.

[Cory King]
That’s true. Yeah, oftentimes those lessons can be worth way more than the initial investment at the end of the day, right? Like just by going through the process and like the takeaways you have from it all is worth 10X the original investment was.

[Mattias]
100%. Well, break down your team a little bit more with me, your niche you have there. And then also like, let’s hear about your investment group.

[Cory King]
Yeah, for sure. So the team really started off like myself and my business partner about two and a half years ago is like I started to kind of, I was just heavy in the space, really like niched down into servicing like investors and landlords, like essentially myself, you know what I’m saying? Just like at the local level, as well as knowing I could be a resource for others that were inquiring through this area.

At the time I’d partnered up with Bigger Pockets and to just connected with other people. I’m very active on the boards in that community as well. So I recognized like, oh, I can just be this conduit and be the go-to source for people that are looking to invest in Knoxville or East Tennessee that maybe don’t live here and help building that out.

So the growth of the team also came from like, one, I needed some help, just I needed some leverage and other people to help me facilitate this business. And two, man, I also got tired of just seeing other agents like struggling in the business and also not taking action in their own investment journey. And so a lot of like what I do is help be the model for agents on my team, like showing them, here’s the different plays you can run.

Here’s ways you can raise capital to go run a play. Here’s how you can position yourself in a deal to have some equity in it. One of my agents has a 15% equity stake in a new construction.

They’re doing like a build to sell, but he found the buyer, found the dirt, put the builder, like put all that together and they’re all working together. And then when they go exit, he’ll get to list it. And then he’ll also have an equity position in that deal.

It’s awesome, right? Like I love showing people how to do that. And so for our team, we’re just a collective of agents and investors.

We’re all on the same journey. Some of us are newer and maybe they like own a home and some of them are like, they own a home. They’ve not bought their first rental.

They’re all just kind of figuring it out together, but it makes for just a really powerful group. And I’ve worked to kind of curate specialists like in that space as well. So one guy on my team has been a short-term rental manager for the last, I don’t know, close to like a decade, right?

So we’ve got the Smoky Mountains and Sevierville Pigeon Forge down there. It’s like 40 minutes away from us. So I wanted to have like a footprint out there.

I was like, well, let me just go partner with a guy who’s been doing that, but his agent business wasn’t so strong. And he recognized, well, I could help him with his agent business and getting that rolling while he can still do his short-term rental management. And it just kind of formed Voltron, so to speak, right?

Or I, again, I’m a comics nerd, so I think a lot in that. I work on then building just a universe so big, other people could see themselves building their universes inside of that. I like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, right?

Like Captain America’s got a trilogy and Iron Man’s got four movies. Captain America, or Thor’s got four movies. Ant-Man’s got a trilogy, for crying out loud, right?

And so they’re all superheroes to their own niches and their own communities. And then when they come together, we get like end game. We get this mega event.

And so I recognized like, oh, if I can go partner with other people that are maybe niche specialists in there, we all like, when we come together, we’re the super resource. I just brought on an agent who has been working for a builder like specifically like Barn Dominiums, like helping people go find land and then build a Barn Dominium. But she’s not been doing the just regular, say, retail business.

But I was like, oh, I can show you that and I can help you build that out. But I don’t have your like five years experience in that space. But I come across people all the time that, hey, Cory, I would just love to find a piece of dirt that I can build like a Barn Dominium.

I was like, excellent. Like now I have the person, right? So I’ve worked to kind of build this superhero team of specialists where we can all lean on each other and grow.

And I just then focus on being the good model and showing people the different ways to build their businesses out and build the platform for them to be the superheroes to their own people.

[Mattias]
Yeah, I love that. There’s one person I interviewed once that also had a team. And one of the things that he did I thought was really cool was he basically, he was trying to train and coach people in the investing space as well as the real estate sales space.

And he had kind of a policy where if somebody getting started didn’t feel confident in doing a deal or whatever, that he would partner with them 50-50. And on a deal, they would have to bring it. And they would be working through, obviously, a lot of analysis along the way to try to make sure if deals pan out or not.

But then ultimately, they would complete a deal together and that person could decide the next one that they find, if they wanted to do it again as a partnership or if they wanted to do it independently. And I thought that was a really cool way of kind of giving some mentorship in there. I was also curious if, I didn’t hear you say anything about, forgive me if you said it earlier, but about doing any property management then for people.

Is that something you all have explored?

[Cory King]
It’s not in our current business model. It’s something, I’ve got great referral relationships with property managers and I very much lean on them. One of our go-to resources, she manages over 1,000 doors in this area.

I know that’s a brutal business. Again, you have to get upwards of 200 plus doors under management before that really starts to make money and make sense. And so for me, it’s just not in my business plan.

It’s certainly there for the next couple of years because it’s just its own other monster. And I’d rather just like, when somebody will ask me about rentals, I can paint in broad strokes based on my own experience for certain geographic areas about what you’ll see or certain niches about what you’ll see. When people wanna start getting really granular about like, what about this property?

I’m like, one, two, three, Main Street. I’m gonna go, excellent. That’s why you need to talk to Kristen because she just has so much more data to go off of when they’ve got 1,000 doors under management.

She can give you the dollar, the exact dollar amount. I’m gonna give you a range. So I’m a big believer in teeing up the experts in their space.

[Mattias]
100%. And sales and rental management are completely different things. Yes, your license can do both, but if you look at, yeah, you could do both.

I’m not saying you can’t, but I think if somebody’s really geared towards systems and policies and that kind of stuff, they’re often not in the sales role. They’re not like rule breakers and like out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So yeah, anyway, I get that. I think there is something cool. There’s a cool approach of trying to be somewhat of a consultant or almost like a wealth advisor for real estate where that ongoing management could kind of play into that idea.

But then in practicality, I think you would have to, like you said, first of all, have enough doors to sustain it, but second of all, it would have to be pretty much a separate entity. It would have to be kind of like them. So yeah, having a good people that you recommend, inspectors, lawyers, property managers, is just, you need to have that playbook for sure.

[Cory King]
We may end up there, but it’s, man, if I put a time horizon on it, it’s like five years out. It’s like literally not even on my short-term radar. I’ve got other verticals I intend to build out first before we ever get into that space.

[Mattias]
Sure. So then now you also have this huge meetup. I’m curious what that looks like and if somebody listening has ever been to a real estate meetup, maybe describe it a little bit and maybe pitch it.

Like why would somebody be interested?

[Cory King]
Totally, so the meetup is called GRID. I think like a power grid, right? GRID is a National Investor Network.

So it was started by one of my business partners, Rob Chavez out of the Northern Virginia market about 17 years ago. I started franchising it or licensing it about 11 years ago or close to about a decade ago. And so now there’s 30 some odd communities around the country and growing.

Right now, my other business partner, Justin is our Director of Expansion. So he goes out and finds other people that would be communities. It is the largest agent led investor community like out there in the country, like full stop.

There’s, I think collectively probably 40,000 plus people in this community so far. So we launched ours about four and a half years ago. June will be five years for us.

And really it started off as like 11 of us on a Zoom call. I leaned into it because I started going to like local meetups, like a local REIA. And I was like, man, this is just a lot of like old timers talking about like how they bought all these properties for three bottle caps.

And like, they’re not telling you anything about like where they find the deal, where they find the money, like what contractors are good, like who sucks. Like it was just this kind of a good old boys club. And so we found this model as a way of like, kind of like an ally, like if you build it, they will come, right?

Like field of dreams. And so here’s 11 of us on Zoom in June of 2021 when it still wasn’t sure, like, can we get together or not? Like, is it cool to be in the same room?

Because it’s pandemic and like, what’s going on? But like, we started just there. We were doing Zoom.

And then after about a month or so, we went to like a hybrid on Zoom and in-person format. And I think that first one, we had probably six to 10 people in the room, like another six or 10, like on Zoom, right? And then I remember it’s probably our third or fourth meetup.

And all of these are on YouTube, by the way. You can go like grid investor on YouTube, you could find all of it. You can find every meetup I’ve ever had.

It’s all recorded. Now we live stream on YouTube. But I love telling this part of the story where it’s like the third or fourth meetup.

It’s the first time we actually talk about syndications and self-directed IRAs. And it’s everybody’s worst nightmare when you throw an event or a party. Like, what if nobody shows up?

Like, dude, nobody shows up. Like, I’m there, I’m talking to the camera and there’s no one. I’m just speaking into the void, right?

Super gut punch, you know? And I think a lot of people, that’s the time like where you’re so early in it that it’s easy to just like throw in the towel and be like, well, that’s it. Like, try that, we’re done here.

Maybe we just knuckle down. That taught us a lot. Like, oh, we gotta be better at promoting this.

We gotta have like continual reminders for people. Like, it just forced us to improve our game. And so it just continued to evolve.

And it’s fun, you can kind of like watch the progression like on video, like in real time. So you can see like, oh, we start to get to having 20 people in the room and then 30 and then 40, 50. Like, we just outgrew our first space and then we moved and then we started getting, I mean, we’ve had upwards of 120, 130 in the room.

I think our average attendance is probably around 80 now. So we have maybe still like two dozen or so people that will like watch us live on YouTube. And that came out of necessity because it was Zoom to Facebook Live.

And then as I’m working with a lot of out-of-state investors, it was really tricky to be like, hey, like, if you wanna check this out, come be like my friend on Facebook and you can find me there. Like, that was kind of clunky. So it’s like, we just gotta get on YouTube.

Like, I gotta be where I can tell somebody, hey, like, 6.30 Eastern time, first Wednesday of the month, you search Grid Knock Show, like, you will find us live stream on YouTube. We’re just there. As far as the format goes, like, what does that look like?

It’s a, think like a late night talk show meets podcast meets town hall meeting, right? Where we bring in a guest speaker or a panel of people. We have a specific topic that month we’re gonna talk about.

So it might be like something like how to wholesale, how to estimate repairs and renovations, syndications or self-directed IRAs. We’re bringing in either like a speaker or panel and we sit down and we talk about it. It’s some part, we start out with a little bit of like 101, like, hey, what’s a wholesale deal?

Like, that was last month’s or this month’s topic, for example, last week was how to wholesale, like, what is that? But our speaker was a guy, Patrick Martin, who owns ProSource Homebuyers, which is the region’s largest wholesale operation in the air. So that was a discussion around, Pat, like, what was that journey like for you to, in building that out and told his story of they build and scale and it all fell apart and he had to go from 30 plus employees down to eight because it was just a mess.

They started keeping and flipping everything versus just wholesaling, which is what got him to the dance in the first place. So we learned like those lessons along the way. And so through that, like, we have a guided discussion, like with our guests, and it’s now like basically a fully produced TV show.

I got lights and the whole thing and a guy working the camera and it’s a production, I’m sure. But yeah, we’re having a guided discussion and it’s in front of a room of like 80 to 100 people. And there’s active Q&A.

So it’s like an active discussion that we’re having, like we’re kind of guiding this story and people in the audience can chime in and can participate and can ask questions. So it makes for this super cool dynamic environment where you’re not leaving there feeling like, well, man, I never got any of my questions answered or like, yeah, good story, like by pre-pandemic. Cool, bro.

Like, let’s talk about like what’s happening right now in the market and what challenges are people seeing? And our next meetup here on March 4th is just that it’s how to estimate repairs and renovations, which I think applies to like everybody. But in that, like we bring in usually two general contractors from our area and I do some show and tell, like here’s the last three or four flips that I’ve done over the last year.

And I just break it down. Here’s what I bought it for. Here’s how much I went into rehab.

Here’s how much I sold them for. Here’s the problems I had like along the way. And we’re able to come away from that.

We deliver what’s called our four levels of renovation framework so that as we’re pitching deals around for like the year, we’re all speaking the same language. If I say, hey, this is a level one rehab, we all collectively know, oh, that’s about 20 to $30 a square foot. If I say this is a level four rehab, then we all collectively know, hmm, that’s gonna be like 90 plus a square foot because that’s a full gut.

We’re replacing everything. Like it’s starting over from scratch. We’re moving walls, there’s foundation work, et cetera.

But we’re able to deliver that so now we have a consistent language for the rest of the year knowing that as we’re pitching deals around, I can easily say, hey, this is a level two rehab and the community just knows what they’re looking at, which is huge because so many of us talk to wholesalers or flippers. How many wholesalers have you talked to, man? They tell you it’s 30 grand in rehab and you know staring at it, you’re like, yeah, that’s 70 plus.

So it’s educational in that way as well. It’s the best, man. It’s my favorite night of the month for sure.

And from that, we then spurned off a coffee meetup on the third Friday morning because I’m in the South. Wednesday night, it’s tough for people to always make it to church, kid commitments, et cetera. And so our coffee meetup became out of just necessity, like people wanting to be part of the community and so we get together on the third Friday of the month.

That’s not recorded or streamed. That’s really almost like pure networking. We do some interviews.

We do some live deal analysis or shopping deals around the room. But that’s what we do and what it’s all about. It’s truly been the coolest thing to be a part of.

[Mattias]
So cool, it’s so much fun. You’re inspiring me to want to start one up again. I co-ran one.

I ran one for a while. Co-ran one for a little bit longer and then we just kind of fizzled out but that sounds pretty awesome.

[Cory King]
It’s pretty neat, man. I’ll say for agents out there, networking is great and that’s certainly a good Legion piece. Hosting a event is, in my opinion, one of the ways to go.

If I was going to go start the business all over again, I started out just circle prospecting, forced to have my owners, calling down our occupies and just banging the phones and we talk a lot in the business about KPIs. You got to have X amount of conversations a day and that’s just part of business planning. When you look at throwing an event like that, it’s a way of what if I could have, instead of me banging away at all my efforts to get my 20 contacts a day, 100 contacts a week, what if I could throw the event and I could get 100 people to come to me and it’s like a lead funnel at that point because for now, on my sales team, we average probably 20 to 30 new people a month across those two meetups.

And so I can then round robin those leads to my agents to have conversations with because everybody that showed up in that room is somebody who got in their car, who drove 20 minutes across town to come sit in a room to talk about real estate for like two hours. If that’s not a warm lead, I don’t know what is, right? So it just becomes like call them, introduce, like take them to coffee, figure out what they wanna do, like how can we help them?

Where can we be a connector in the space? Game changer, game changer.

[Mattias]
That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s really cool, I love that.

I was gonna ask too quick, we could probably cover like five hours of material here but I do wanna ask quick about your family life too. We talked a little bit off air about like how balance is kind of a tough word when you have this many things happening. You’ve got young kids, they’re younger than mine, they’re also all boys.

Some people say those are harder, I don’t know. Sometimes the girls are harder for me. But we call it a juggling, like you had a really good analogy too from The One Thing but talk about that a little bit.

[Cory King]
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, it’s definitely a juggling act and yeah, to take the analogy from The One Thing, it’s like we’re all juggling different things in life, right, we’re juggling a bunch of different balls and you got business and your personal health, your spiritual health, your family life, hobbies, things like that. And some of these things that we’re juggling, some of these balls are made of rubber, some of these balls are made of glass.

Business is a rubber ball. You can afford to drop it, like it feels anxious when you drop it but it’s a rubber ball, it can bounce back, it’s fine. Things like your health, your spiritual health, your mental health, your physical health, your family life, your relationship with your kids, those are glass balls.

Those are ones that you drop them, they can chip, they can scuff, they can get marked up, they could shatter. Those are ones you really can’t afford to drop, right? And business, we oftentimes as entrepreneurs, we almost like over-prioritize that when like in reality, that’s a rubber ball, man.

Like it might suck and money might get a little tight but it bounces back and the cool thing with being an agent is you have influence over your income. You can go just hustle harder, you can go make more money, right? But you can’t do the same thing with your family in the same way.

So prioritizing that is super important. It’s something I’ve had to learn and I’m still not perfect at it by any stretch, right? But that analogy really helps me bring things back to center and so I’ve worked to put some guardrails in place to help protect those things.

[Mattias]
Yeah, I mean that is, you know, people always, you know, you get to choose your own hours, you get to choose what hours you work, you get to, you know, do that and like it’s easy to choose what 16 hours a day you wanna work. Sure, yeah. But yeah, it is, you know, we have the flexibility, we have the ability to prioritize what we want and there is a scarcity mindset in sales that I think, and maybe the addictive part of it as well.

[Cory King]
Sure.

[Mattias]
Like, you know, like there’s no limits. There’s, and there’s also no safety nets. So like, you know, that motivates one to work hard at it.

But, and I think that’s also kind of where, you know, some of that investment stuff can, even though it’s a long-term play, it does start, you know, bringing in some income and it does start providing as well. And, you know, a dream can be to have, you know, your 100% covered, your finances covered, what you need. And part of that will take discipline to like stay within those means.

But all that to say is that that can really help you prior to prioritize what is most important, those glass balls. So yeah, I love that. It’s a really good analogy.

Well, let’s get into, there’s been, that’s a really good golden nugget, but I’m sure you’ve got others. Did you bring some golden nuggets for us today?

[Cory King]
Yeah, for sure. I’ve got a couple that I could certainly, could certainly like share. Cause I’ll certainly get some people to say like, well, if I’m an agent, like where would I go?

Or like, what would be the best place to start? Or what’s the best way to like find deals? I’m happy to kind of dive into that a little bit.

Yeah, that’s great. What I would say for people that are looking to start is to, we call it, the framework, we call it internally is zone. Like we zone a market.

What does that really mean, right? It’s like zeroing in on a target market or niche. That could be a geographic area, that could be a psychographic market.

So that could be, hey, I go help. We’ve got one gal on our team who really services the seniors and downsizing market pretty heavy, right? You own the mindshare of it’s own, right?

So you zero in on your market, you own the mindshare, that’s through content, that can be through seminars, that can be webinars, that can be, think like social media, that can be mailers, whatever way you get in front of people to own the mindshare in that space. We nurture that through just continual touches, through just staying top of mind with that group, and then ultimately we’re empowering them to take action and encouraging them, and that’s the E in that framework. So it’s really like picking a market or a niche, like you often hear like riches are in the niches, right?

And you can’t be all things to all people. Like if you’re a generalist, you’re a generalist. And I would say like who makes more money, your heart surgeon or your general practitioner, right?

So when you can specialize in something, that can be a little scary because we think like we’re gonna like lose business or that, and while there’s maybe some truth to that, like you’re gonna turn some people off, by being an expert in your space, you’re gonna have far more market share and far more control over your business than you might otherwise think. So like really picking a market, picking a niche that you can really know. Like there’s a few zip codes in town that I specifically invest in personally, and what helps me in that though, is like when an opportunity presents itself, I can move because like I know that zip code cold.

My last flip I did, I bought day one on the market for 20% off MLS price in five hours because I saw it come up. It was listed 100 grand below what I knew the after repair value was for. I was able to call the agent, find out a little bit more about the scenario, drive over there, take a look at it, call my assistant and say, hey bro, like just start drafting an offer.

I’m gonna tell you what price we’re gonna offer like as soon as I get there. Went through it, walked it, kind of knew the math in my head, called, got the offer presented, here’s my proof of funds, had it tied up, done. But I could do that because I knew the area cold.

I knew the neighborhood, I knew what I was looking at. And so I could act far faster than anybody else could because most other investors would have to go over there and hymn and haul and bring a contractor over there and they would waste a day or two just trying to analyze this thing. But I knew it because I knew the zip code, I knew the area cold.

So really like niching down and then just like picking a strategy by which you’re gonna go do that. So if you’re gonna just like prospect, if you’re gonna like, let’s see, if you’re gonna do expires, like do expires, don’t squirrel around. Like pick something that you can do and do it for a minimum of 90 days because without that you’re not gonna have any data to go off of.

And so many people I find, like they squirrel around too much. They try something for like a week and then they bail and go do something else. And like you really gotta take a 90 day focused, hard effort at something before you’re even gonna know whether it’s working or not.

[Mattias]
Yeah, I love that. That’s really good.

[Cory King]
Yeah, that’s a huge one for me. And certainly just being an agent has definitely just helped me out like on my investment journey to that point. Like speed is one of those things.

Like the more market knowledge I have around something, like the faster I can act on something. I don’t have to really waste a lot of time. And I can represent myself like in those deals as well, which also helps a bit.

I don’t have to wait on somebody to, I don’t have to like wait on an agent to go let me into a house or something like that. If it’s vacant, I can just go and show. Like I’m an only child, so I’m naturally just can be impatient and selfish.

I just think I wanna go do this thing. I don’t wanna have to wait for somebody. So part of me, that was where I got my license was I knew that, oh, I can just go.

I don’t have to wait for it. I could just schedule and I could be there in an hour.

[Mattias]
Yeah, 100%. If you don’t have anything else there, I would ask about the book. Do you have one that you think is fundamental that everybody should read or just one that you’ve?

[Cory King]
Totally. I’ve got two if I could share actually because I think they’re both important, right? Number one is Profit First by Mike Michalowicz.

It’s one of my favorite ones because that really helps you understand your financials and what to do with your money when you bring it in, which is like super important. And how to structure yourself or how to pay yourself, you’re profit first and paying yourself and how to operate your business off of say a limited amount of expenses and then scale it as you grow, huge one. One of my favorite ones, one of my biggest recommendations.

Number two would actually be Exactly What to Say by Phil Jones. It’s a great, simple book to understand conversational frameworks, how to ask really good questions and then listen for motivation. We’ve got a rule on our sales team, we never ask why.

That’s a forbidden question. You’re never allowed to ask why. You can’t ask somebody like, you can’t ask somebody, why are you moving, right?

It’s, oh, what’s got you thinking about making a move? What’s causing you to think about that? It’s a different frame.

As parents of young children, when your little kid’s coming up and asking you and they’re asking, what’s the first question we learn as humans? Why, right? And then as parents, we can get frustrated because my toddler asked me, why, why, why, why, why?

And our natural answer is like, because I said so, right? So it’s a confrontational question. So we don’t train to that.

We try to find ways to ask who, what, where, when, how, anything that starts with that is the good start for a good question. So exactly what to say helps give you some like magic words and frames that you can ask really good questions. And that’ll help you in sales and just in life in general.

[Mattias]
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. I’m not to pick that one up. I have not read that one.

And the profit first one is definitely one that we are trying to revisit and restructure. I think it’s very common in this business that you have the dry season where a lot of things can happen. And it’s just, there’s the ups and downs of the business.

And I know a lot of people operate differently. There’s people that will dip into equity lines or whatever to kind of keep the train running until the money starts coming in again. But obviously the more you can just kind of forecast and plan and save for and keep your expenses within line of what you’re producing is makes a ton of sense.

[Cory King]
It makes a really good like analogy or kind of frame I’ll share with that. It’s like it talks about like how part of why we got really fat in this country is because our dinner plates got bigger. Like if you go back a hundred years, like most dinner plates are like saucers.

What we would consider a saucer. They’re like a little six-inch plate, maybe a nine-inch plate. And then we allowed our plates to get bigger.

So we put more food on there and then we just eat more. We got fatter, right? But if you give your business like a smaller plate to eat off of by taking your profit first and then paying yourself, like you gotta get paid for doing the deal.

Profit is separate from that, right? That leaves you with like a finite amount of expenses to operate your business off of. And when you do that, you’ll find one you’re staying in a very disciplined way to like operate your business.

You’re actually operating your business like a business. A lot of agents I think we get into the business and people tell us that like you’re a business owner now and you’re operating like a business. We don’t really quite conceptualize like what that means, but like it’s true, you are.

And that’s a great framework for how to actually give your business money to like operate off of but without getting like super bloated and super fat. You’ll force yourself to get creative when you have a smaller amount to work with at the front end. You’ll find ways to get creative, how to have a lower client acquisition cost, how to keep your disexpenses low and how to hire in the right order.

So like that book’s just like foundational for me. Like it’s one thing I can tell everybody. I’m like, you can buy one book when you start getting into it.

Like that’s one exactly what to say is number two like in that one.

[Mattias]
I love it. Those are great. And then is there a place that if they wanted to learn more about your meetup, about you in general, about what it would be like to buy in that area or invest in Knoxville?

Sure. Where can they find you?

[Cory King]
Yeah, where can they find me? So you can search if you wanna find, check out our meetup a little bit more. You can check us out.

We’re on YouTube. If you search Great Investor on YouTube, you’ll find the entire grid network on there. My business partner, Justin, hosts an amazing show every single week as well, like a podcast that he hosts on there, interviewing agents from around the country. Great one for people to tap into.

So check us out on YouTube there. If you wanna check out myself and my team a little bit more, you can go to thecazagroup.com. That’s C-A-Z-A group.com.

You’ll find us there. You’ll find all the markets that we operate in because we’re here in Knoxville. We’re in Raleigh, North Carolina, and also in the Northern Virginia market as well.

So kind of this mid-Atlantic South region, is the area of growth that we’re operating in. So if you wanna check us out, come check us out there. And then if you wanna find me on socials, I think I’m pretty easy to find.

Like Instagram is just @CoryKing on Instagram. You can find me there. Happy to chat.

[Mattias]
Perfect, Cory. Well, thanks so much for being on the show. Like I said, we could probably talk for a few more hours, but I know your time is limited.

So thank you so much for being on.

[Cory King]
Hey, appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.

[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 the show is not investment advice or mental health therapy. It is intended for entertainment purposes only.