Daniil interviews Dennis Henson Alright! Dennis Henson, thank you so much for being with us today. You re somebody I've been meaning to interview for a long time. I know you've got a lot of information to share. So let's just jump right into it. Give us a brief introduction, tell us what you do right now, give us your background, what you've been doing, I know you have a lot of experience. You're active in Texas but I'll let you elaborate on that, then we'll jump right into the content. Ok Daniil, thank you very much. Well, I have been investing for a long time. I have a real estate group in Dallas Fort worth area. And some of the people that come in to speak, they have been in real estate for 40 years, 35 years but they're young at this. I started in 1971. I only have 1 speaker that has been in real estate longer than me. It s Albert Lowry. I'm raised from Alabama and living in Arlington, TX now. I started investing back in 1971 and have been doing it part time for a number of years. I have been full time for many many years. I specialized in Single Family Homes, rent to own, owner finance, wholesale flips, rehabs etc. (used homes). I've been involved in many hundreds of deals throughout the south (mostly in TX). I'm a real estate investor first and do other businesses second. I'm an educator, I take a few students on and people invite me to speak. I'm the President of the Arlington Real Estate Association of Investors, that's a meet up group. In fact, it's the largest meet up group in the world. Not in Texas, not in United States, but in the world. If you rank me, if you click on the keywords, we work really hard to get to the top. How many members? We have over 4000 members in our Arlington group. We have over 3500 in our Bedford group. And I have about 5 other groups that are smaller. That's impressive Thank you. I have a large email list I get in touch with lots of people. The people that know me probably know me because they got an email from me sometime. So you've seen a lot of market cycles? I think this is obviously a huge asset in terms of experience that you have. You've seen multiple up markets, multiple down markets, and you've survived them all obviously if you are still here investing. A lot of investors, even myself included. I have been active during the recession. So I haven't ridden the down wave yet. You've got experience in multiple recessions and surviving those recessions.
That is true. Well, Real estate investing is kind of like a sea saw, when the market goes down the rents go up because houses are not selling and people have to live somewhere and there is a bigger demand for rentals. So, your rentals you just hold onto and rent goes up and it pays the mortgages and you can just hang in there. But when the market reverses, it goes up. I sold a lot of homes last year. I made a lot of money, I have a terrible tax problem within a year because the market sounds taken off here in Dallas and that's when you sell. I didn't sell everything but I continue to purchase. But if you get into Real Estate investing and really into it, there are so many different ways that you can make money. It's not just buying and selling but there are lots and lots of different ways to make money so it makes it pretty easy to take advantage of whatever the market is doing. Oh yeah, absolutely. So let's talk about Private Money. Let's talk specifically private money. Are you using private money in your business still? Absolutely. Is private money for somebody brand new to this business who doesn't have a lot of contacts, some people will say it's a pipe dream. Some people will say if you're brand new, go get a hard money loan, pay your 14%, 5-6 points and it's impossible to find private money lenders. Is that true? No, it's absolutely not true. I change private money sometimes and when I do, all the money you need is available to you. There are just so much private money lenders out there especially in the metro place like big cities: Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago where you just have these tall buildings full of these little cubicles, and everybody in those little cubicles has a 401K, and there's hundreds of thousands of them and they are all retired. And when they retire, they are looking for something to do with that money they accumulated from the 401K. So what I try to do is move them towards to our quest or equity trust or someone and turn those to separate RA which is now they're in my bank. It's really pretty simple, I call it the money skill. I have the 5 skills, Money, Money, Maintenance, Marketing, and Managing. If you become good at those skills, you're a good real estate investor. The money skills are actually pretty easy. It's as simple as learning the script, memorizing the script, and saying it every day. You say your script every day, you're going to have private money. The problem is going to be finding enough deals to put the private money in place. So let's start at the beginning. Let's assume you're not Dennis Henson who's been investing since 1971 and has done hundreds of thousands of deals. Let's assume you're brand new, you just decided you want to rehab and flip a couple of houses this year. You don't have connections, you don't have rich mommy and daddy that can finance you or rich uncle who will finance your deals just because he loves you and knows you since you were little. Let's assume you don't have those contacts, you're starting over. What would you do in the next 30
days? Where will you start? Where would you find people to talk to and to give your script to? Before we even talk about what the script should be. Well, there's lots of books you know. If you want to become a real estate investor, you can go to the library and become a real estate investor because there are so many books written on the subjects. There is a criminal back in the early 20th century whose name is Seth, and back then the only news media is a newspaper. And so they came up to them and asked, "Why do you rob banks?" and Seth said, "Because that's where the money is". Well, if you want to find private money, go where the money is. It doesn't really take very long to figure it out. If you go to country club, you think everybody has money in the country club? What if you went to the bass pro shop? The people there are buying a boat. If people are buying boats, they probably have money, right? Here in Dallas Fort worth area, we're so lucky because we have all of these financial planning meetings. And they have them every month. And 2 of these meetings, they require you to have at least a million dollars and be of retirement age. And they will say that you will need to sign quickly because their seats fill up and they will only take 100. At a minimum, each one of those meetings has 100 million dollars. But they have to go through the haul to get there. And how many of them do you need? You don't need 20, you only need one. If you got a million dollars, you ve got to buy a lot of homes. Those people in the meeting are there to plan with they re going to do with their money. And they're probably worried about how it s going to look and worried about where to put that money? I bet very few of them walked into those meetings self-assured and confident about their future. That's why they're probably there to begin with to figure it out. Exactly! What you learn is skill which is a relatively easy skill to learn. You can go out and just pick your number. How much every money that you want to raise for single family home real estate and basically you're just getting started, you really only need 1 private money lender. I learned from John Chalp. John was my original mentor, he's been around for a long time, he's a good friend of mine and John, he has never been to a bank, he's been in business forever and he gets all of his money from private lenders. And so one day, I was having dinner with John and I said, "John, you've been doing this for a long time, how many private lenders in your whole life do you think you ve had? He thought for a few minutes and he said, 6. I believe it. Yeah, it make sense. And I thought that's not too many. And I got to thinking and I listed all mine I had 11. Somebody has 2-3 million dollars, you're set for 2-3 years. How much more do you need, especially if you're rolling your money.
So you ve filled in a couple of points so far. 1, relationships, you re not going too magically find some private lender database online where you can call somebody up and say, "Here s my deal funded. They will turn out to be Professional lenders and or Nigerian scammer. And we'll talk in a second about what to actually say to these people. But I think the other misconceptions is that you need a ton of lenders. Everybody I know that uses private money lenders would say very similar to what you said and that you only need a couple of really good relationships. You don't need a lot. That's true. People call me sometimes, when my students will call or people in our meeting/meet up groups will call me and say, "Do you have some private lender that you can tell me about?" And I'll say, "No, Private Lender is like giving a list of my girlfriends. You can call them but they don't know you. You have to develop your own relationships with Private Lenders. And when you learn to do that, they will be loyal to you. Because they don't know all of these other people. You brought them in, you explain to them your work, they trust you, your program works and what you will find is they will bring you more and more and more money and bring their friends and relatives in. At some point, the money will overwhelm you. And you will go to get some deals to replace this money. I completely agree and you will get a ton of referrals. Once you help somebody to put their money to work and do what you ve promise to do and deliver your word. They'll tell their friends about you because they have the same issues. Their friends probably have similar wealth levels that they do and they have similar problems, right? Where do I put my money? Let's go back, let's say you go to this financial adviser meeting and there's people walking through those hallways, you just make friends with those people? Do you go and ask them to make a presentation? I really want to nail down literally. What actually would it take, if you have to do this? Here's what you do, have you ever gone to a hotel and you walk down the hall and the meeting rooms were on both sides and you re are having a big meeting and you can hear people talking and cheering. And you are waiting 'til someone came out and you said, "Tell me what kind of meeting you're having?" Is it a perfume or AMWAY? What kind of meeting is it? Because you are curious. Everybody s done that. I'm sure I am not the only curious person. Well that's my technique. I will go to these meetings, my students go to the meetings and I don't even get close to the meetings. I just wait to see someone come in and go out and I say, "Hey hey, come over here what are they doing in there?" Because they really know that they don't know what I know. And they tell me, "Well that's interesting, you're here to find a way to place your retirement. Well how does that work? And will get them in a conversation. And I will ask them, "Where did you retire from? If I can get the people to talk about what they do at some point they will ask me, "what do you do?" Now I got them, I mean I've been fishing and that's where you do the elevator pitch. And I'll leave them open ended and it's up to them to say, "That sounds interesting, tell me more". And when they tell me more, then will go to the next step which is not there, it's in another place. We'll meet at a coffee shop or restaurant and show them a presentation. I'm just standing in the hall like I'm supposed to be in that hotel.
Right! You're just there to meet people? You're not there to pitch the heels here and there, right? You are not trying to get a homerun but getting the first base with people. That's right, I'll just get their name and phone number and that's it. What's your Elevator Pitch? When they say. "Dennis, what do you do?" Well, you know that I'm a real estate investor and it's funny that you were mentioning investing because from time to time, I allow people to invest in my business where I'm in Dallas Fort worth area. I will buy Single Family homes at a deep discount, fix those homes up and I will turn around and sell them retail. And I do very well at that, In fact I know you might not be interested but you may know someone who might like to make 6-9% return on investment secured by first lien and some good text real estate. And you will shut up and think, "Wait a second, how does that work?" And now you got them. And now, it takes about 40 minutes to explain it and I have this nice little presentation. Could we meet somewhere at a restaurant so it is convenient for both us and I will explain to you how it works so if they're interested in this, maybe we can do something. I like it Once you get to the place, you already have your presentation in a PowerPoint and all you have to do is read it. You don't have to study or anything it's in big letters. You can ask some questions, you can answer their questions. At the end of the presentation it says, "Does that sound like something you will be interested in? And if so, you pull out your commitment form and you get them down on the paper. At the time, they may say maybe, they may say no. What do you do with that? Well if you have enough of this going on, the truth is you really don't care if they take it or not in investing in Real Estate. You know I'll make about 30-40 offers a week. When I'm making these offers. I don't expect or care what they do. Because I know that if I'm making enough offers you'll get money. With the private money you just set yourself up by task. The most successful private money lender I've ever met, asked them, "How did you do these? You put more private money together than anybody out". They said, I've never lay my head to pillow at night unless I make 3 presentations. If you do these little presentations 3 times a day every day of your life, I promise you, you re going to be overflowing with private money. You re going to have so much money you will not ever need to go back to a bank for the rest of your life. In fact you will start lowering your interest rates because as you get more, you
don't need it as much. So you can lower 9% to 8%. My better students borrowed money at about 6%. Private money now points about 6%. Some are as low as 2 or 3. It's a number's game. You need to not just do it once, you need to make a system out of it. There is nothing more powerful than being consistent, deliver and effort. Keyword being consistent. Requires a little bit of pro-activeness and being social and outgoing to degree. That's a skill that's also learned. Nobody starts off being able to talk to a stranger necessarily. Very few people are natural at striking up conversations to strangers. But any skill can be learned and acquired overtime and private money at the end of the day, it's a relationship that does it. The biggest misconception people have about Private Money is that you can just go and get it somewhere. You ve got to build relationships with people. It requires at least a couple of meetings. That person that you make the presentation to that says, "Ohm, well think about it and talk to your wife", maybe meet them in a coffee shop in a month or maybe they call you in a month or 2 and say "How is it going?" They follow up with you. You may have 3-4 more meetings with that person. Maybe you'll become friendly and those are the relationships, right? Exactly. If you make friends with people, it's amazing what will happen. You catch so many flies with honey. People get to know who you are. With me, I'm on the stage all the time. Everybody knows who I am in Dallas Fort worth area. If you Google me, you re going to find a lot about me. I have a pretty good reputation and have no negative comments. It is easy for me at this point but when I started, I was just like everybody else. I was just getting started, I am not that much of an outgoing person, and I m a pretty hard driving businessman. But as far as making new friends and developing relationships, that was not a strong forte. But it was not my goal. My goal was to find money or find the deals. And that's what causes me to be driven and in order to do that, I have to talk to people. And so I learned what to say and I went out and said it and that works. And I think you re going to share your Private Money presentation with us that people can take a look at and even replicate if they want to. I haven't look through the whole thing. I assume that it includes your deals, right? Examples of deals that you've done, your track record. If you were brand new, what would that presentation include? What would you put in that presentation? Actually, the presentation that I made to perspective lenders, it doesn't show them. I made the presentation that I'm going to give everybody. In there it shows many of the deals that I've done and it shows where I actually borrowed more money than I need. That's what's exciting about private money. If I go to a bank, the banks will probably loan me 85% of the purchase price and 85% of the fix up cost. But if I go to a Private Lender, I'm going to borrow a lot more than that. I'm going to borrow enough money so that I can the buy the house, fix
it up, and have money to drive my truck, pay my phone bill, and have a secretary and have a nice office to run my business. Now you can't do that with the bank, it's called bank fraud. But with the Private Money, if you explain it to them and you give them the right disclosures, then you're free to do whatever you need. And so, if you buy a home at a deep deep discount, let's say that you buy $100,000 home and you get it for $55,000 and you don't need any fix up there's a lot of equity in there. If you borrowed $60,000 and you only needed $55,000, so you got $5,000. What can you do with that extra $5,000? Anything you want to and it's tax free because it's a loan. That's pretty powerful. I don't know if there are any other technique of money that can do that. Yeah, you can't do that with hard money, you can't do that with banks and that's one of the reasons why we're talking about private money today and because if you can build those relationships, there's a lot of flexibility in what you can and can't do in how much money you can borrow. Right! I have never had a private money lender ask me for my debting forms which I don't have any or my last year's taxes or to fill up a long form. They're lending you the money based on the property, there's where the security is. And so you don't have to jump through a lot of hoops and it can happen that quick. You can meet someone and very quickly, have them take money to the title company and you're ready to go with that deal and take some money and start spending it. So now, one thing that's exciting is every time I buy property with Private Money, I can put $5,000 - $10,000 in his pocket tax free. I like that. That's great! It's exciting! Because there s never an end to it. But let's go back to your presentation. You're making that presentation from scratch. You're Dennis Henson back in 1971, just starting. What goes to the presentation? What else can you put in there that can communicate to your private lender that you are knowledgeable with your business and you can be trusted because that's really what it is about, right? It's about trust. It's about them looking at you and saying, "Well this guy fears credible. He's dressed nice, he talks the talk. How do I know that he walks the walk? It's not about me. Before it passes that point, they would never come and sit down with you unless they felt like you have something to present to them. It's about your deal. Here's this beautiful $200,000 home and I am only wanting to borrow $130,000. Now, the very best thing that can happen to you will be "I didn't pay you". Because if I didn't pay you, you get the $200,000 home for a $130,000. What will you do with that one? You can go the next day REA meeting or any Real Estate investing meeting and stand up and say, I have a $200,000 home and I'll sell it to you for $130,000 and there will be a line right there in the middle of
the house. That's real security. What I'm doing to them is I am presenting them a way to make a really good return on their investment better than most any other investment they can make. Secured by first lien on the most valuable thing there is. Sometimes I see this TV commercial and it says, "Gold has never been worth enough" and I think I don't know if that's true or not. But I tell you this, if you find yourself on a deserted desert island, the very first thing you will be looking for is shelter. That's been true since dawn of time, the very first man, the very first thing they look for. They don't look for food, they don't look for water, I love to watch those survivor shows on the TV and I enjoy those. They're not looking for shelter, it's going to be really cold at night, they'll get rain and they will be getting uncomfortable and on the next day they will be building a shelter. No matter what happens in the economy, if there's a war no matter what happens, people are always going to need a place to live and single family homes are the number one place. I mean apartments that go up and down depends on what's happening. But there's always going to be a man for single family home. Always. And you will explain that to your lender. You said, what can be a better investment, when is this ever not going to be valuable. And you explain to them as the market goes down values of the rentals go up. And if the market goes up then you sell it off and pay it off the private lender. It is not an easy presentation to make because it is not about you, it is about their collateral. And you show them, "Here's the paperwork, this is going to make you safe. It's a first lien on the property there will be no other liens, you can run title search. And you're in a very good position because if I pay, you re going to make your money, if I don't pay, you even make more". So let's talk about the paper work. And I know varies state by state. In certain states, you're going to have first mortgage and other states you're going to have a first lien, right? Well, pretty much throughout the United States you're going to give them a note. Whether it's a judicial or non-judicial state, you're still going to give them a note, right? A promissory note. A promissory note. Here's how much I going to pay you, here's the interest, here's when I'm going to pay it back, here's where I'm going to pay it. So all spelled out in the note. Then in certain states, you have deed of trust and other states you have mortgages. Either one or the other. And so you will give them either your mortgage or the deed of trust which they can record at their local court house, or you record it to the title company who will record this, and that's their security. So, if they don't get paid, they go and foreclose. So 2 contracts you're using with them?
That's the 2. Yes, no trust. And also use other forms, always give them a disclosure saying that there are always risks involved and keep it legal. Always give them, or give me an acknowledgement form that says, "This has been explained thoroughly, I understand it and I don't have any problem with it and I'm ready to do this with my money and have no hesitation". I have 2 of those, the Disclosure and Acknowledgement. And then, this is really important. In fact, this maybe be the most important. I have them sign a commitment form. Now, when you start this, you're going to find out that you ll do a great presentation, the people say "Yeah, I got $200,000 go find me a deal", you go find them a deal, you come back and say, "I'm ready. And this, "Oh, yes. I'm so sorry. I took that $200,000 and invested it in someone else. I just forgot about it". Now, I came up with this beautiful form, the commitment form that says, "You're going to hold onto this money, are you're going to call me". That's all in it. The only promise is, "I promise that I'm going to hold onto this money until you find that deal and we'll work together or I will promise you I will call you". And you give them a copy and keep a copy. And when I started using that, I have yet to have a single person who didn't have money there when I came back ready to do a deal. He puts his name on there and sold his deal to me That's really cool, I like that. Can I put you on the spot and ask you to share the commitment form. Sure Yeah, I'd love to be able to give that to our listeners. So first, Deed of Trust, Promissory note, before you even get to that part when you make your presentation, you make them sign the commitment form when they tell you that, "Hey, I'm ready to do business". They sign a commitment form. When you give them a form with disclosures, here are the risks that you could potentially incur by investing in Real Estate, by doing this deal. You go give them the disclosure form. That's right. You give them that form when you make your presentation, or when you're signing documents to closing a deal? Once they have committed, you ve shown them the presentation and they say, "Hey, this is really what I want to do, I have $150,000 and I'm ready to invest with you. Then I will pull the commitment form out and I'll say, "Ok, I'm going to put $150,000 here and these are the terms that we've talked about". Normally I do it like this: If they want to be paid monthly, I pay them the rent monthly, ok 6%. If they want to get paid every 6 months, I'll pay them 7%. If they want to be paid once a year, their interest once a
year, just interest, ok. I'll pay them 8%. And if they wait until I sell the home or 5 year passes, I'll pay them 9%. And guess which one of those everyone picks? They go for the 9%. Well of course they do because in a self-directed to R8. If you pay them their mind in back, They have to reinvest it. They can't touch it. It goes directly to their area and it's not making you money anymore. By leaving it with me, it's compounding. So they would be crazy to want it back. And of course I will explain it to them to make it very clear. And so all of my loans are 5 year loans and if they have extension, so if I need to extend, I have the right to pay some principal and extend the loan. So that's huge, because I didn't catch that part in the beginning. Your private lenders are long term. You're not just funding flips with them. You re buying rentals with private lenders. That's right. Yeah! That's huge. Or owner-financed, or whatever I need to do. If I sell a home or want to pay it back, what I usually do is at the end of the year I can go to my bank. And now the bank will loan me money based on the value of the property and not what I paid for. And you could refinance.. And now I can go to bank to borrow more money 4% or 5% and pay them back. And what I will do is I will not pay them back, because it's in the contract that I say, "Would you want to roll this over and let me put the lien against to a different property", and they always say, "sure! Because they want to keep on investing. So what I am doing is that I'm odd-meaning the money that I had by bringing bank loans as I refinanced. I like that a lot. I think that's another misconception of Private Money, right? Everything's short term. Everybody thinks it's like hard money and you got to pay it off after 6 months where in reality with all the investors you have been dealing with don't want the
reinvestment risk. They don't want to tie up their money long term because of maybe their retirement account, because they want that consistent rate of return for long term. You pay somebody off in 6 months. They just made 600% of their money but they got to figure out where to put it back into to continue their return. That's why for a long period of time, you're going to have small number of investors because they want to keep it investing. In fact, John Jobs said "I would have a hard time giving the money back to my investors because they don't want it back. They want it to stay and build.. Yeah. So the commitment form, disclosure form, do you make them sign on a prequalification form? Are you ensuring that their accredited investors? It doesn't matter. They don't have to be accredited investors for me because, I keep up with the laws. I don't over extend myself and I'm always bringing the bank money in to take them out. They don't have to be accredited investors to invest in small real estate transactions. Okay, make sense. So, let's go back to your idea and I really like your idea of finding these people. Going to financial adviser meetings, sitting outside of their big presentation and kind of socializing with people. Let's say you live in a town where financial advisers don't exist. They're just not allowed across the town where you live. What other types of settings or organizations would you go to and check out? Where else can you find these people that can get you access? I grew up in a little tiny town in Northeast Alabama called, Center. Probably not many people hear about Center, Alabama but they have a country club in Center, Alabama. If anybody is a member of a country club, they probably have money because they have to pay the fees to be members, they have to pay for the golf balls which are very expensive, they have to pay for the cart, they have to buy the clubs, and I mean it's an expensive thing to be a part of that. A lot of people that go to church. There are wealthy business people that go to church to support their business as part of their business. Where do people where you live congregate that have a lot of money? Is there a Lake close by? Well, It's hard to go anywhere in United States where there's no water close by. Where did these people buy their boats? Go down to the lake and see all the sailboats lined up there. We'll just go stand up there on a Saturday afternoon in front of the yachts and everybody that passes you is worth millions of millions of dollars. And there's retired people in every community. So, it's just a matter of using of your brain to think about. Where do the people who have money congregate or where can I go and find someone. But the truth of the matter is this...everybody has a money. The homeless guy that you're passing on the street that's holding up a sign. If you're looking at his pocket, you're going to find money. Everybody's got money. You want to find them a little bit of power up in there.
But you are right, it is everywhere. I mean like you said, religious organizations, go join a non-profit, right? Go get on the board of a non-profit. People that typically volunteer and go get on the boards of a non-profit usually have money. They're wealthy to the point where they have some free time and they want to give back. That's a great place to meet people. But you're right, I think it's a matter of consistent action and just being creative. And realizing that these are relationships, they take time to build, it takes time to meet the right people and it doesn't happen overnight. That's another misconception that people have is, they think that this stuff happens instantly. You go and you find it. It takes relationship building. Well, if they look on the presentation that I'm going to give them, the very first thing it talks about is failure. In order to become skillful at any skill, you have to be willing to fail so go out there and learn as much as you can, read as much as you can and go out there and start trying and don't worry about failing because failing is a big big part of success. And the more times you fail, especially if you learn from your failures, the better that you going to get. So just go out there, just don't care whether they take it or leave it. You're just learning. You're learning to say your presentation in front of different people. Just get better at it. Yeah, just get good at talking about it and you'll be surprised. One of these days someone's going to say, "Sounds like a pretty good deal, I think I'm going to do that." And then another and another. I always like real estate investing, you buy your first deal the first thing you know you got 10. And you look back and you got 25 deals. It seems like it happened overnight but it didn't. When you look back on it, it may seem like it happened quickly, but no. I keep saying, consistence, deliver, action it s one of those things. If you're starting out, will you go to building this relationship before you have this deal you want to fund or wait until you have a deal to get funded and then go out and look for other. If you wait to a have deal and make it funded, you have to get a hard money lender because it's too late. I tell my students this, they should spend all of their time finding deals and finding money. All of the time. Everything else, if we look at the other part of the office here my secretary sitting over there she does everything, the files, phone calls, all of the things that need to be done and actually I have 12 people here in my office. And the only thing that I do is make offers and talk to people about money. We spend about half of our time talking to people about money. Consequently, you always have to be prepared because tomorrow somebody may bring in 40 single family homes that you could get for $0.30 on a dollar and you better have some money when that happens. Because you want to pull the trigger quickly. Yeah!
Right. Yeah. And I think it's great. And those are the 2 things that you need to run your business, Deals and Money. If you compare those things, you win. Everything else should be delegated to someone else that's better than you. One of the great things about the business, especially in United States is you can always find somebody that can do it better than you that makes less than you do. That s true Because when I'm working on real estate, I'm probably making a thousand dollars an hour. That's probably maybe even low, okay. Why would I be working on a $15-$20 job in making phone calls and files? When you can delegate it to someone else, yeah. Absolutely. I think that's great. Any other tips? Any other tricks? I think we've laid out kind of a good foundation here, right? Any other served tips or tricks that you've want to share that have led you to your success? Any served big, overarching, points of wisdom that you told yourself back in 1971 when you first got into real estate? Here's the thing, when you re first getting started at anything, you're not going to be very good at it. If you want to learn to swim, the first thing you got to do is go find some water and get ino the water. Reading books is not going to make you a good swimmer. I will give you some techniques, my wife just bought me a motorcycle last month. And I was so happy about that motorcycle and then I said, "I have not ridden a motorcycle in 16 years." It's like learning to walk all over again because there's so many things that you have to deal with. But as the days went by and I have spent more and more time on the motorcycle and it became more and more fun and it got to be second nature, the habits are kicking back in, I felt really good and now it's great to get out on the road and riding my motorcycle. In real estate investing, there's 5 skills that have to be mastered. Money, Money, Maintenance, Marketing, Management. Money, finding deals. Money, finding money. Maintenance, getting the property fixed up. Marketing, of course is getting new property's field and Management is property management. Once those skills are mastered and you become its second nature to you or you learned how to delegate it and teach others to do it, then the business becomes fine. It's just a matter of numbers. As long as you do your number, you are going to be able to reach new heights. You know one of the great things that I see about real estate investing and the position I m I meet a lot of successful people, like yourself. You can do whatever you can do. Last year 2016, we had 12 trips planned. I mean we went all over. And the last 2 trips,
we just cancelled it. We travelled so much last year we decided to just stay home and we've been here for a while. Now you can't do that in other businesses, you can't do that as a school teacher, or working in an office or whatever. But the rewards of building these skills are so much greater than anything else that you can do. Your 5 skills, you master those skills and you can just bring, you name it. You bring the amount of money in that you choose to. The freedom is incredible It is. We've been out of the country 5 times last year and that doesn't include other trips. It was probably 15-20 trips last year but we just left the country 5 times and I can't imagine being in some other line of work and being even doing anything close to it. And that's the same thing that I taught my students and my clients is that, have patience, build the skills, build the knowledge base and the rewards are incredible. It doesn't have happen overnight like everybody wants. Everybody want to push a button and become an instant real estate millionaire and they think some courses might be at fault for that and some marketing but it doesn't happen overnight but if you just learn, acquire the skills set the rewards are incredible. Same thing as building the Private Money Relationship, they may take a little bit time to build before people opening up their wall but from there on its game changing. Money starts finding you after a while. Exactly People start coming to you saying, "Hey, can I invest with you? Somebody told me about your deals or I saw your pictures on Facebook of your rehab that you did. I'm looking to invest." It completely flips 180 after a certain time. For your students out there... Look, it is not about you. Don't say, "Oh, I can't do this because I haven't done a deal, or I haven't got this." It's not about you, it's about the deal. If there's enough equity in the deal, you are pretty much irrelevant. Then you don't pay them. That's should be the huge takeaway from anybody watching this because a lot of people have self-limiting beliefs. Right!
Because they focus on themselves. And I love what you're saying here because it's really not about you, it is about finding people who have needs that you can fill. It's about finding people that have money problems that you can fix. It's about solving those people's problems. And it's about your deal. It's not about you and I think if people can understand that, they will overcome a huge self-limiting belief that probably prevents them from speaking to a lot of people and from building relationships. Absolutely! And deals are great. You know, if they have their money in a bank seats. Getting at most 1.9% and that's if you leave it there for 10 years, you'll get less than 2%. You got to promise to leave it there for 10 years. And I hope the bank doesn't go out of business. Well, I guess you're FDIC insured but you know, your CD is over what, $250,000 now and bang goes bust and so does your money. That's right. You don't want it protected that way. And if you can purchase it you learn the mining skill and are able to purchase properties and at a deep discount, it is really very attractive to them belonging that money to you knowing that if you don't pay them, they might end up with the property and a lot of money more than you've even promised. It serves as a paradigm shift in a way. The worst thing that s going to happen, is that I don't do what I say I am going to do and completely fail you. You actually make more money. You get this property back and get more money than you were made than by just lending me. That's a worst case scenario. That's mind blowing. If you really think about it, that a huge paradigm shift. People who have money who understand how it works, they can see that. If they may look at you and think, "Well, they just make for dollar and may end up with this property". It doesn t take very much figuring out to come up with an idea that the $200,000 property and I could loan them $30,000 and give the first lien of it, I'll do that every day of my life. Oh, yeah! I have no risk You may have to do a little more work, but when you re taking the property back at the end of the day, it will be hugely profitable for you. This is awesome. This has been hugely valuable
and insightful information. We're going to post the link to where people can look at your private money presentation below. I'm also going to post the commitment form that I think it's awesome and I like to share it with people. How else can people get in touch with you? What's the best place where they can go, they can follow you maybe get access to more of your education, get a hold of you etcetera. Well, I have DennisJHenson.com, that's a free site. It's a blog, we post on it daily, and it takes you to all of our other things that we're doing on other websites, our paid websites, our trainings or whatever. But if you just go to Dennis J Henson, there's a tip of the month, there's always a video tip on there which will be useful in your business. There's a pick of the month which would be something that you can use in your business that we have found and it's been very useful to us. And you can just click on it there and there is an available to all the past picks and has also the past tips. That's a good starting place that will take you to many of the places if you're more interested in knowing more of the things that I do that will take you to the other places. Okay! Awesome! And I will post the link to that below the videos as well as people can just click on it and access it. So, that's phenomenal! I really appreciate your time, this has been awesome, I really think this can help a lot of people and really appreciate you being on. Well thank you for inviting me Daniil. It's been fun. Maybe we can do it again one day. Anytime! Absolutely - End of conversation-