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Hello, everybody. Kevin Clayson here. Thank you for joining us on Replace Your. Once again, I don’t have Steve here today because we’re gonna play an episode of another podcast for you today. Kay. We want you to hear, I was interviewed on a show called The Best Real Estate Investing Advice Ever Show, and this is a lar.

This is a massive. Real Estate investing podcast. I think they’ve done like two or 3000 episodes. They’ve been around a long time. They’re very well known. They’ve got a great presence in the market for real estate investors looking for some advice, and I was asked to be on their show. To come and talk about done for You Real Estate.

And on this episode, on this podcast, on this interview, a guy named Theo Hicks. He’s one of the main guys over it at the best real estate investment advice ever podcast. He asked me about our philosophy, right? What the philosophy is of how we do real estate, which is, you guys know, is that Moneyball philosophy?

It’s going and hitting real estate singles. We get into some stuff on this interview that I think is extremely interesting and I gotta tell you. I guess we really are unique in our perspective because we have just been hammered with people from all over the country asking about who we are and what we do, because they’ve never heard this kind of real estate investing advice ever.

So in a couple thousand episodes, I guess nobody’s ever been talking about. Single family residential real estate and Moneyball real estate and going and hitting real estate singles, at least not in the way that maybe we do it Done for you real estate and on the Replace Your Income podcast. And so they asked me to come on.

We had this great discussion about Moneyball real estate and about hitting singles and, and we get into some incredible stuff that we thought maybe might be beneficial for you guys to hear too. So enjoy this episode of the Best Ever Real Estate Investment Advice Podcast with Theo Hicks interviewing me, Kevin Clayson.

Where we talk about going and hitting real estate singles, and thank you for who you are, for all that you do. We love you. Thanks for listening. Enjoy this episode and in this interview, and we’ll chat with you next week. What would your life look like if you could replace all of your working income with simple and conservative investments?

That could do it for you. Over the last 13 years, we’ve helped thousands of clients transact over half a billion dollars in simple and conservative real estate transactions, allowing them to begin replacing their work income with real estate investment income. Each week we’ll be pulling back the curtain on the ins and outs of real time retirement based real estate transactions that will transform your financial future.

Even if you have no real estate experience, this is replace your income with. Kevin Clayson and Steve Earl. I’m Theo Hicks, and today I’ll be speaking with Kevin Clayson. Kevin, how are you doing today? Good, Theo. Thanks for having me, man. How are you? I’m doing well and thank you for joining us. Looking forward to diving into what you do.

So Kevin is the owner of Done For You Real Estate, a multimillion dollar real estate investment company. He has 15 years of experience and his company has transacted around 4,000 single family homes. He’s based out of. And the website is d f Y dash real estate.com. So D isn’t done. F as in four, Y as in u dash real estate.com.

So Kevin, do you mind telling us some more about your background and what you’re focused on today? Yeah, sure, man. I’ll be honest, I never thought I’d be here. I was not one of those kids growing up that was repackaging pixie stick powder and selling it to my friends at school, right? Like I was not entrepreneurial at all.

I grew up in California just right outside of Oakland, and I just grew up like a normal kid. My. He was always working sales jobs. I just thought, Nah, I’m gonna go to school. I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna go get a good job somewhere. Right. Well, I ended up graduating high school, went and lived overseas for a couple years, came home, got married shortly after I came home.

I was in my early twenties and dude, three and a half years after getting married, I find out my wife is leaving me. It totally rocked my world, so I had this crazy thought. The thought was, Oh my goodness. Maybe if I stop working retail and I go get a real job with my real college degree, maybe she’ll come back to me.

It didn’t work out, which was a good thing. But what I ended up doing is I ended up getting a job with Wells Fargo doing mortgages, unsecured lines of credit, and doing auto loans. And the reason why that was such a crazy piece of the story is I had never even thought about setting foot in the financial real realm whatsoever.

And I found myself kind of liking the mortgage product, right? I’m like, this is kind of cool. I was kind of digging this idea of these amortization schedules, which I had never heard of before. And I was living in Utah at the time. I came back here to Utah to go to school, and here I am starting to do loans.

So one day I was prospect. And I called up a buddy of mine who I knew was doing a bunch of real estate investing, and I’m like, Hey, who does your mortgages? And he’s like, Well, kind of have somebody, but dude, it’s been a long time. We should go to dinner. Well, we go to dinner, and there was about four of us that decided to start a company.

To help people invest in real estate. So at the time, this was like 2007 or so when we started the company and the whole idea was we wanted to help people transact real estate instead of just pay for education. Cuz there’s awesome education out there, there’s awesome mentorship and programs. But we saw so many people that would spend tens of thousands of dollars to learn how to do real estate, but then would never go transact real estate.

So we’re like, Well, let’s fix that. So we just started to help people do real estate. One of us would put a plan together. I’d do the mortgage. One of us would find the home, and then the other would help the person rent it out. And frankly, that’s what we’ve now been doing for 13 years is just now we’ve got clients from all over the country and we’ve done, as you mentioned, a good number of properties.

So now that’s what we focus on, helping hardworking Americans stay focused on what they’re best at, and then we help them by investing in simple and conservative single family residential real estate and some of the best markets in the country by doing all the work for them so they can gain all the benefits from real estate without having to be an expert in, without having to do all the work themselves.

It’s always interesting, like hear people’s conception stories. Started a business and always just seemed to be, Well, I always met some dude I hadn’t talked to in years and then we started the company together. So that’s the power of networking, right? ? Exactly. Yeah. I can’t tell you how many times I hear that.

So you definitely reaffirmed a power of networking. Okay. So you have the four people. We got the planner, the mortgage person, the home finder, and then the person who rented out. So you’ve done, for you real estate obviously by the title is a turnkey company. Yes. Right. It is. It’s turnkey, but with kind of like a little bit of a difference, right?

So a lot of turnkey companies, you’ll go to the website and hey, here’s properties and it’s ready for you and buy it. That is not what we do. Everything we do is purely custom. We always specialize in a certain type of real estate, right? It’s gotta check the boxes. We have teams on the ground in multiple markets throughout the country.

We get clients that come to us from all over the country that just wanna buy real. So we can help people buy real estate in states they don’t live in. Assuming that the real estate is a good fit for them. So we take our clients to different states, to different teams and look at different price points of properties, at different cash flow targets based on what they’re trying to accomplish.

Cuz for us, we try to help our clients replace their income, one property at a. So it’s very much like they’ve got money in a 401K or an ira, or maybe they’ve got home equity and they’re looking at it and they’re going, Oh my gosh, the math isn’t gonna add up. So then based on wherever they are and whatever assets they have available, we can create a custom income replacement plan and then begin to transact real estate with them in an order that gets them to total income replacement, hopefully within the next 10 to 15 years.

It’s simple and conservative, long term real estate, but there’s a plan to it. So that you organically grow the portfolio over. So would you say has a difference between what you guys do and what the traditional turnkey company does? Is that you kind of enter into the process a step earlier and rather than just presenting a bunch of properties, you start at what’s a good fit for them based off what they’re trying to accomplish and what they are capable of?

So from my perspective, if I want to do. How does that work? Am I paying you money to do the plan or is that something that kind of comes with assuming I’m going to buy a property? How do you know? Yeah. Who to do this plan for? Is anyone who comes to you or do you need to see something first? No, what we do is we always do kind of an introductory call, so we’ll just talk to people and we’ll make sure that they’ve got assets and ability, and if they have assets in ability and they think that they wanna move forward with our company, we actually own a mortgage brokerage.

We’ll, Full preapproval in house. We effectively underwrite the file in house before we ever shop a lender, so we know how many pieces of real estate they can buy, which markets we outta target for them, and what their cash flow projections, what they need to look like. Then we assign them an individual to work with them and introduce them to our teams in the market, help them evaluate properties.

They get properties under contract. We go through and do the loan form, and then where we make money is we. Flat per property fee. It’s a separate buyer paid commission only charged at closing of $4,995 on the closing documents. And we include that in all the calculations as we’re trying to determine whether or not ROIs are gonna fit, we’re saying what’s our total out of pocket expenses?

We’re gonna take everything into consideration from down payment to what our fee is to potential rehab expenses, and then we’re gonna look at projected rents on the property and projected appreciation. And then we’re gonna just do the calculation and say, Does this give us the kind of projected rate of returns that our clients are looking for?

Once we know that that’s the case and they put the property under contract, go through that process, we get ’em. We also own a little insurance company, so a lot of times we could do the policy form. Then we’ve got our property managers that work with our teams in the market that then find the tenants and rent them out.

Now, the other place where we differ, it’s not only the customization on the front end of putting a plan together. We don’t charge anything until someone closes on a home with us, we. We’re $0 until you close on a home. That means we’ve gotta perform. And that I think is why our clients come back again and again and again cuz they’re not paying us an upfront fee.

We just go to work and do the work. So that kind of customization of showing them properties that are custom fit for what they’re trying to accomplish, that’s one aspect that’s unique. Another, the fact that they can work with our teams in multiple markets simultaneously, as opposed to just look at a list of homes and kind of pick the one they want.

Combine that with the hand holding we do throughout, and then where we really are quite different is most turnkey companies. Once you close on the deal, it’s kinda like, cool, good luck. Hope it rents well. We continue to work with our clients year after year. In fact, annually we put together annual property and market reviews on their property.

We pull the numbers, we see how it’s performing, we see what the market’s looking like so that they know when it’s time to refi, when it’s time to sell, when it’s time to just kind of hang back and hold tight. So we continue to work with our clients year after year. Cuz the way we’re successful as a company is when our clients do multiple transactions over a number of years.

When they sell one and 10 31, exchange it into a couple more, right? So that’s kind of the way that we approach it. So sounds like it’s pretty customizable and so I’m sure the answer is, it depends. But what type of single family homes are you targeting? Are they already fixed up and turned key, or are you finding distress properties and then fix them up?

Or is it a combination of both? Good question. It does depend by market. The acquisition strategy depends on the market, but generally speaking, we’ve got some new construction product that we do in Orlando, cuz we work with builders out there In Indianapolis is another one of our markets. We’re largely looking at recently published MLS deals.

Sometimes in Memphis, we do a lot there. We can get pre NLS deals because we have a reputation and people kind of know. And then we’ve got a couple other markets we’re opening later this year, so it totally does depend, but they’re always in the same box. Here’s the box three or four bed, two bath, middle class type neighborhoods, two car garages.

Ranging and purchase price from one 60 to 230,000. They’re gonna cash flow anywhere from three to 600 net cash flow a month after you pay everything out. So it’s kind of like blue chip real estate, slightly higher quality. We’re not doing really low in stuff, we’re not doing really high end stuff. We’re frankly doing the kind of single family residential real estate.

That is in the highest demand across the board. Yeah. And the reason that we do slightly nicer properties in slightly nicer neighborhoods, and these are neighborhoods that are primarily owner occupied neighborhoods with a handful of rentals. The reason that we do that is usually the tenants, they’re in a position where maybe after they rent from you for a few years, they may be the ones that buy your property.

Now you have a chance to sell that property due to the 10 31 exchange to potentially grow your portfolio. So the quality at tenant that we attract, Targeting these types of homes in these neighborhoods as a higher quality tenant, which means your rent is far more dependable and usually your property’s taken care of much better.

So usually any of these properties across the board, we don’t do massively distressed properties. We’re not doing stuff where we gotta go and throw a hundred grand at it or 50 grand at it. It’s like a few thousand dollars lipstick and paint. Get it ready. Cuz usually if by going and finding deal. With our teams on the mls, and our key is we just, we are super zoned in on our neighborhoods and our zip codes and our criteria, so we can take action on deals quicker than a lot of people can, just because we have the buyer preapproved ready to go.

So we know we have everything in front of us to be able to go. But what’s cool about that is if we get homes off the mls, which we do a lot of the times, Those are homes that were listed by a primary residential owner, . So they usually try to get it pretty nice. They try to get it looking good. So that means we could go in and just do the most essential critical things that mean it’s gonna rent as quick as possible for as much as possible.

And again, I know it depends, but what’s a range of rents on these types of homes? Just to make sure the understanding. So you’re probably between 1,015 hundred. Okay. That’s probably the range for the vast majority of. And then mention the mls and then developers, what else are you doing to find deals? Is it just MLS and developers, or are you doing other things as well?

We used to do a ton of auction, but auctions just aren’t quite what they were during the great recession, so there’s a lot of institutional capital. It’s really hard to kind of compete at the auctions and to get the stuff that we wanna get. It’s just. Always as available at the auction like it used to be.

So it’s primarily mls, new construction and sometimes pre MLS stuff. But we don’t do foreclosures. We don’t really do short sales or anything like that. It’s really just super boring, straightforward real estate that works and works and works. Do you ever have an issue with deal flow or are you able to keep up with that many of your clients pretty well just through those evidence?

Yeah, it’s awesome. We’re totally able to keep up and the main reason is because we just have awesome teams and we’ve got multiple people in our teams on the ground in those markets. So having developers and stuff that you can work with from a new construction standpoint, that can ease some of that because look, nobody else is looking at those deals, right?

Those are things that we’re able to do cuz there’s effectively a portion of that subdivision earmarked for done for you real estate clients, cuz we want it to be primarily owner occupied in that neighborhood. But that gives us a little bit more flexibility. So we don. Necessarily have that supply problem, even if demand is high.

Right. And that’s been really awesome for our clients especially. How many deals do you guys do on average per year? We’re not a huge company. We probably do between three and 500 deals a year. And those are purchase transactions, we’ll probably help our clients sell another 200 or so deals a year. It fluctuates.

Right? But that’s pretty common. And in fact, One kind of cool thing that we do is on our website, you can go to d fy dash real estate.com. There’s a tab that says, See the results. I don’t know anybody else that does this. We post our annual transaction reports, so you’ll be able to see every transaction we did.

So we give just partial address. It’s not full addresses, but. You can see what the purchase price was, how long it took to get the property rented out, what the cash flow was on the property. When our clients are listing and selling a property, you could see how much equity they were able to capture when they sold the property.

We put it out there by market so that that way we could just be super upfront and honest and stand on our track record and say, Look, this is who we are. This is what we do. And we like that cuz we don’t know a lot of other people that do that. But we’re happy too cuz we keep track of it anyway, so we might as well share it with the world.

All right, Kevin, what is your best real estate investing advice ever? Oh dude, that’s one of my favorite questions. Okay. Do you remember the movie called Moneyball with Brad Pit and Jonah Hill? Yep. Okay, so I grew up just outside of Oakland. So I grew up in Oakland athletics fan, and I didn’t know Moneyball was going on until the movie came out.

And if you haven’t read the book, you should do that as well. But if you remember, what happened was the Oakland Athletics were trying to compete with the New York Yankees. The New York Yankees had like one of the largest payrolls in all of Major League, the book and movies specifically Chronic the 2001.

Season and the A’s didn’t have that much money, but they had to compete with the big boys. So what they did is instead of spending a ton of money on flashy, expensive players that maybe would fizzle out, maybe they go and get you a whole bunch of home runs. It was a little bit of a gamble, little bit of a risk.

What they did is they bought dudes that could get on base good at taking walks, good at bunting, good at hitting single. And they called it Moneyball. It was the idea that they were paying for on base percentage more than they were flashy, big name players. The best advice I can give anybody when it comes to real estate, especially when you’re starting out, is don’t go try to hit home runs.

Go play real life. Moneyball with real simple real estate, hit real estate singles. So, so many of us want the big deal, right? We wanna get up there. We’ve heard about how much money you can make in real estate, and we just get up there, we swing. Fence. And then you’ve got gurus out there that’ll say, Oh, whatever you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.

Or Babe Ruth, he struck out more than anybody, but he had more home runs than anybody. And we use this thing that we kind of use as a psychology to make somebody feel guilty if they don’t swing for the fences. But here’s the difference between you and me, maybe and me. I don’t know about you eo, but me and Babe Ruth.

And the difference is, When Babe Ruth got up and he swung for the fence every time, if he struck out he had another at bat coming in at Naing or two later, for most folks that have worked really hard to get money saved up for their future, if they get to the plate and they swing and miss, they may not get another at bat.

So what we say is just go hit real estate singles, and that’s that simple and conservative real estate, right? Maybe you’re getting a 30 year fixed loan, you’re gonna own it for three or four or five years before you sell. It’s not gonna be a traditional bur property where you’re gonna try to turn it over really quickly.

You’re not gonna try to target massive cap rates of massive cash flow. You’re not gonna try to go and do a massive rehab. It’s like simple and conservative, super boring, predictable, but you. It works. You hit enough singles with enough velocity over enough of a period of time, you win every single game you play.

And that’s the way we approach real estate. And it’s what served us well, so that no matter what the world is doing, and no matter how many financial crises we have to go through, our clients succeed. The company succeeds, and we change people’s lives. One property at a time. A solid, solid advice. All right, Kevin, are you ready?

For the best ever lightning round, let’s go. Okay. Kevin, what is the best ever book you’ve recently read besides Moneyball? I gotta give you two. Okay. One is The Go Giver by Bob Berg and John David Mann. It’s a little business parable that’s game changing. The other is a little bit more of kind of a business book.

It’s called Give and Take by Adam Grant. Those books change my perspective on everything. If your business would’ve collapse today, what would you do next? It’s funny, I’m actually an author and I do motivational speaking and I go and I speak at middle schools and high schools and help kids know how to be happy in the middle of really tough circumstances.

And I’ve got a book that’s sold in 26 countries throughout the world, so I would just double down and write more books and go speak at more schools and go try to serve more people that way. If I wasn’t doing real estate, what’s the book call? The book’s called Flip the Gratitude Switch Book. Congrats on that Success.

Thanks. Let’s see, what’s the best deal you’ve done with a. It’s hard to say that there’s a single best deal that we’ve done with the client because they all kill it. But here’s what I’ll tell. I look at a deal that we did with a kid who had saved up money to get one little investment property before he went and served a church mission, right?

This was back in 2009. The dude put 25 grand down, which was a 20% down payment on a. Property in Phoenix. He went and served God for two years. He came back. He built 60 or $70,000 of equity, was able to refinance it out and go get a second property. Then he was able to use the equity from those properties and go buy another property or two, which funded his law school education at Harvard, and now he’s graduated from Harvard and he’s got this real estate.

Fol that could pay off all his student loans if he wanted to, but he just wants it to keep growing. So one simple deal with 20 grand down 10 years ago has transformed this kid’s life. That one I think about a lot. Yeah, that’s the good, best ever deal. What’s the best ever way you let to give back? It’s kind of a philosophy that I try to live by and it’s not some sort of grand gesture.

It’s this, It’s only four words long. It’s leave people better off. And all I mean by that is think of what this world would look like if every one of us walked into it every single day, realizing that all we gotta do is leave people better off than we find them. How much better would our. Be, What would it be like?

Our relationships with our kids if inside of every small, tiny interaction, we try to leave them better off. And then what about our clients? And what about the stranger that we meet at the store? What would this world look like if we didn’t try to compete and shout louder than one another? But we just try to leave people better off.

And so my little contribution is every day in every way I possibly can. Inside of every single interaction I have, I try to leave people better off than I found them. And then lastly, what is the best ever place to reach you? And anything else you wanna mention before we wrap up? I wanna mention that you’re awesome.

Thank you for having me on the show. The show is awesome. If you’re listening, you are awesome. And the best place to find us is dfy, Like Done for you, d FY dash or hyphen real estate.com, d fy dash real estate.com. And also listen, if you’re listening to this and you’re a podcast, Fan. We actually have a podcast called Replace Your Income, where we go through our strategy and go through deals and talk about what we do with our clients.

It’s not nearly as good as this show, but if you got extra time on your run or walking your dog and you don’t have anything better to listen, to give, replace your income a listen and otherwise, social media is always a good place to find us too. Done for You Real Estate usa. Perfect, Kevin. Well thank you for joining us today.

I can definitely tell you do those kind of talks. You’re a very good speaker and very animated. My hands man. I know. We’re like on a Zoom call. You’re probably getting motion. My wife always makes fun of me. She’s like, What would you do if you had to keep your hands in your pocket? I’m like, I don’t think I can speak if I can’t move my hands.

I don’t think it’s possible , but I can see the passion for sure. Thanks. Aw man. Thanks for joining us today. Enjoy this conversation a lot and really what it kind of comes down to your best of advice really summarizes everything we talked about, which is you don’t need to hit the grand slam. Do the crazy deal that makes you a million dollars or a hundred thousand dollars.

It’s just consistent, simple deals over a long period of time. As you mentioned, you work with people to reach your financial goals in 10 to 15 years, not in a week or a year or two years even. So in order to do this, you talked about doing the single family rentals. You were very specific on the type of property that you target.

We talked about how your company’s unique. Essentially starts earlier on in the process and doesn’t just give them a menu of girls to choose from and then say, All right, good luck. You work with them from the beginning to figure out what their goals are, and then you will match the. Property type and market for their goals, and then you’ll help ’em through the entire transaction process.

And then the back end, you have the property management in place, you do the annual market property reports and help them sell it as well. So it truly is a full survey done for you, a real estate business. Something else Instagram you said that I liked was you focus on following the simplicity, you focus on the MLS as well as new builds, and you focus on new builds because you wanna focus on the owner occupied area.

Because you’ll be able to not only get renters faster, but you might also have the possibility of selling it to that renter on the back end, since most people own the homes that live there. And so it kind of increases the chances of you selling the property, or at the very least, increases the chance of you selling it faster once you decide it’s go time.

Plus you worry about getting the tenant out of there and all that other stuff that delays the sales process. It makes real estate more liquid when you do that, you know? Exactly, yeah. At the end of the day. Exactly. And then, and I loved all of your lighting round responses as well, so Kevin, thanks again so much for joining us today.

Bester is always, thank you for listening. Have a best ever. See you guys. Thanks so much for listening to Replace Your Income with Kevin and Steve. Do you have a question you want us to answer on the show? Head over to Apple Podcasts and do three simple things. Leave us a rating and review and tell us what you think of the podcast.

Then in that review, ask us anything you want related to real estate or income replacement. Then sit back and get ready to have your mind blown, and if you wanna shout out, leave your Instagram handle or. And that’s all. Then listen in to hear your question answered, live unfiltered and uncut. Thanks for joining us on Replace Your Income and just remember income replacement for you and your family may only be one property away.

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