You cleaned real estate.I washed a lot of windows for wealthy real estate developers. It was okay. From the outside looking in, I did okay. I had some crazy things happen because of it. I washed, I don't even know how many hundreds of thousands of pieces of glass in my life. I had three trucks and thirteen employees. By the time I sold it, I had some tutorial videos on window cleaning on YouTube that had millions of views. I ended up on the History Channel because of it for random as possible.
It was a struggle. I wasn't making money. I wasn't where I wanted to be. I wanted to get into real estate investing. I started listening to podcasts. I wised out on the job sites like this one and I wanted to figure out how to get into real estate. I kept hitting all these obstacles. I had bought a duplex but now the banks wanted more down. They wanted a better debt to income ratio. I then just had all these obstacles to get more investment properties. I didn't know what to do. I felt stuck.
I had read
Rich Dad Poor Dad. I was all hyped up but didn't know anything. I wanted to get there and I had something cool happened. I had heard about wholesaling but I was like, "Wholesaling? That doesn't work." You can't find 50 properties, $0.50, $0.60 on the dollar even cheaper and then pass those deals onto other investors and make $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 just by finding the deal. That doesn't exist.”
There were people talking about it. The guy was talking about how to get into investing in real estate with no money and that stuff. It was a turnoff. It sounded too good to be true. Of course, it was in my mind. I was very much a skeptic. I learned and heard about it but I was a skeptic. I started washing windows for this guy. His name was Stan Nielsen, super-wealthy, big old house, beautiful house. His wife's name's Peggy, the nicest people. I found out he was a real estate developer and he retired from being a civil engineer in his twenties.
I got talking to him like two hours after our conversation. I was like, "If I could just get two rentals this year, it would be life-changing." He’s like, "That's convenient. I got these two properties. I don't want to deal with them. I haven't collected rents in four months. I lost my property manager. I have this agent who wants to list it. I don't want to list. I just want it to be done. Would you buy them?" I was like, "Sure. I'll buy them. How much?” He's like, "$500,000," which was a huge discount.
Those things are worth $800,000, their 1-acre horse properties, nice houses. Honestly, they had some deferred maintenance. I said, "That's a great price. Thank you." He's like, "Can you get a loan?" I was like, "No. I can't get a loan." He's like, "I could be the bank. I can finance them." I was like, "Okay, great." He's like, "Could you put 20% down?" You do the math. Most definitely not. I was like, "Could you do a a couple thousand dollars down? Would you do that, Stan? I have a couple of thousand bucks." He's like, "That'll work." I was like, "Really?" It was done.
He had these multimillion-dollar development projects going on. He didn't want to deal with him. He didn't need the money. We built a relationship. He wanted to see me succeed. There were a lot of reasons there. I was like, "Holy crap, motivated sellers exist." People are more educated, financially well off than me, this stuff is real. You can find these deals.
I'd heard people talk about them. A lot of people would see this and be like, "Deal of a lifetime. You're never going to find something like that again." People talked about how there are ways and strategies. You can do that over and over. I quickly became a believer. I drank the Kool-Aid. I was in. I had to do more of this. I had to get out of window cleaning. I had to find deeply discounted properties. Instead of buying them and keeping them, I had to figure out a way to wholesale them.
Find the opportunity and pass the opportunity off for a fee. I became obsessed with it and I've had a massive amount of success. A handful of years from it, I went from barely scraping by to be worth well more than a million dollars. I'm making over $1 million a year. It's crazy. it completely changed my life. I don't say that to brag. I feel compelled.
People have to understand exactly what you're doing with it. It's not being braggadocious. It's stating what most people like you did when you first came across the opportunity is that this is real because I'm doing it. I'm not a guru. I'm not preaching from the back of the bus. I am doing it. I'm living it. I find it to be very genuine when you're able to make the statement that you can do what I did. I was a window cleaner. I'm just a dumb contractor. Everybody thinks there's a lot of glory in contracting until it's rainy, muddy, nothing's going right and the job's going south. Stating with who you are, Zack, and putting that label on there that of what you've been able to do isn't bragging at all.