Meet Tim Bratz. He is 32 years old, born Cleveland and lived in New York after college. He was an entrepreneur who started in real estate right after college. Before his success in the real estate industry, Tim went through some tough times. He never had a job after graduation. His dad was always telling him go to work and get a job. His father had a good job and owned a business. Tim always wanted to be an entrepreneur and go that route. When he was going to college, the market was going crazy. Everyone was talking about getting involved in real estate industry if you wanted to make money.
This is what motivated him back then and he got involved in real estate in New York City with some commercial lease and retail sales. He was a real estate agent; he was a broker for commercial stuff in New York City and was negotiating leases and seeing these investment sales.
He looked at the leases that were being negotiated and saw that the landlords were making tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in just the ground floor for retail. This made him think twice about his current job. After a year of doing that, he picked up for a lifestyle change and moved down to Charleston, South Carolina.
In Charleston, he read every book, went to every seminar, spent a lot of money and got some debt. But he realized, if he was going to learn how to swim, he needed to jump in the water. Eventually, he found the cheapest houses there for the market in Texas. In the year 2009, he bought his first house.
From Tim’s success story, we learn one of the most important elements in the real estate business: the reality that to start playing the game, the only resource that you need is the ultimate resource which is resourcefulness.
Changing your mind-set
One attitude that helped Tim to boost his career was changing his mind-set. In the beginning, he thought of better questions instead of having that negative commentary on your head like, “I don’t have any money.” He instead, thought of “How can I get the money?” It transfers your thinking to more of a thought provoking mind-set versus just a minimizing, self-diminishing mind-set.
Instead of saying, “Man, how do they do that?” start asking yourself, “How can I?” If you’re asking yourself good questions and you’re finding the answers, you ask yourself better questions, you get better answers.
Tim bought a house and fixed it all up. At first, he didn’t know what he was doing and didn’t know how to sell it. He just put up a hard sign in the yard, get some flyers up, physically did all the work, changed all the carpet, did the painting, did the landscaping and I did it again. Eventually, he got into wholesaling.
In wholesaling, he learned how to contract a property, sell the contract and taking a fee on that. He started to build his network with active investors who had the cash and had the resource to buy these properties and to developed relationships with them. Soon, he built up enough credibility.
Now, Tim has developed his apartment portfolio to around 400 over the past 24 months. He successfully transitioned from single family houses to apartments. With his track record, Tim has more deals offered to him compared in the past. He successfully bought another 200 units in the past couple months and has another 600 under contract to close in the next 75 days, right around 1200 units by the end of May.
Resource from being resourceful
For Tim, it took him nine years, who started young in the real estate industry. Surely, ]there’s a lot of people who have resources, who have connections, who know people with money but no one will be willing to lend a bunch of money to go buy apartment buildings to a 23-year old kid who has never done real estate before. Tim maintained his resourcefulness. He put together the deal and made the deals enticing enough and promised his investors to take the deal back in case something goes wrong.
Once you learn how to ride the wave of real estate, you will see how amazing it is once you built up that momentum on how easy it is to raise capital. There’s an art and science to it. It doesn’t happen overnight. For most people, buying 600 units almost in the next six months or whatever, that may not be as realistic but then it may not be because that can only be a couple of deals.
There’s an opportunity for anybody no matter where they are in life, no matter how old they are, whatever gender, race or religion. Put your head down. Be willing to work and don’t give up, that’s a key to success. Just don’t quit, eventually you’ll succeed. You’ll get a kick in the crotch sometimes and it’s going to hurt. It could be painful but just keep on getting back up and keep on working. Eventually you’re in overnight success.
