It's Quentin Flores here, and I'm about to take you on a no-holds-barred ride through the raw truths of entrepreneurship. Together with my guest Eric Sangerhausen, we unravel his remarkable transition from a humble pest control operative to a real estate mogul. Buckle up for an episode that peels back the curtain on the hustle, growth, and resilience required to carve your path in the business world.
Eric's story is one for the books – from navigating the twists and turns of a pest control startup to flipping land and revolutionizing the real estate game. Our chat isn't just about success; it's about the personal touch in business, embracing technological advances, and cultivating genuine customer connections. We're sharing the kind of wisdom that can only come from years in the trenches, so expect to walk away armed with insights that could redefine your approach to entrepreneurship.
But what's a journey without its community? We don't just cover the triumphs; we tackle the challenges of community building, from launching an innovative fly shop to growing White Line Realty into a diverse and resilient tribe. From taking that all-important first step to scaling new heights in business, our conversation is a testament to the spirit of those willing to leap towards their dreams. Join us for an episode that promises to ignite your ambition and possibly set you on the path to your next big venture.
It's Quentin Flores here, and I'm about to take you on a no-holds-barred ride through the raw truths of entrepreneurship. Together with my guest Eric Sangerhausen, we unravel his remarkable transition from a humble pest control operative to a real estate mogul. Buckle up for an episode that peels back the curtain on the hustle, growth, and resilience required to carve your path in the business world.
Eric's story is one for the books – from navigating the twists and turns of a pest control startup to flipping land and revolutionizing the real estate game. Our chat isn't just about success; it's about the personal touch in business, embracing technological advances, and cultivating genuine customer connections. We're sharing the kind of wisdom that can only come from years in the trenches, so expect to walk away armed with insights that could redefine your approach to entrepreneurship.
But what's a journey without its community? We don't just cover the triumphs; we tackle the challenges of community building, from launching an innovative fly shop to growing White Line Realty into a diverse and resilient tribe. From taking that all-important first step to scaling new heights in business, our conversation is a testament to the spirit of those willing to leap towards their dreams. Join us for an episode that promises to ignite your ambition and possibly set you on the path to your next big venture.
Just because I love you, it don't mean I trust you Everybody not to be trusted. Everybody around me thuggin', everybody around me druggin', Everybody around me hustlin'. Everybody know not to bring no newtin' Around me. They say I be buggin', got wrecks in the go-yard luggage. Just because I love you, it don't mean I trust you Everybody not to be trusted. What's up everybody? Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, quentin Flores, and this is Uncut with Q podcast. I'm your host, quentin floors, and this is uncut with q in this podcast.
Speaker 1:Guys, if it's your first time listening, you already know that we have a fee for the show and it's very simple and we don't pay any ads. We don't. I've turned down sponsorships. We don't do any of that here. I want to have full control over the shit that I say and the people that I bring on to the show. So you know we do this for free. We spend money to put this show out there and and I want you guys to, if you get value from this, the fee is you share the shit out of this show. All right, we built this entire platform where we're top 1% right now in entrepreneurship in the world and like legit, we've done the whole entire fucking thing word of mouth, and I think that the world operates amazing when you do amazing and other people share the amazing shit that you do. So, guys, if you get value from this, share it. If you don't, then we're going to do better on the next one.
Speaker 1:If this is your first time listening, we have multiple different types of shows. We have one where I'm bringing on a guest. We have another one where me and Trey surf the internet. We have another one where we are answering your questions. Go to wwwquentinflorescom, slash ask Q and you'll be able to submit questions and we can answer them live on the podcast, whether it's about business, fitness, health, anything Right. And so, guys, this show specifically for y'all and I haven't been able to have a guest on here in a while We've been doing all kinds of different stuff. I don't even know which episode we're on at this point, but we're over 55.
Speaker 1:All right, this show. As much as I love doing these things, we don't get a lot of love on YouTube, so don't forget that you can watch full length episodes on YouTube right now, where you can actually see me and the guests, you can see our interactions and you see all the cool stuff that we throw up on the, on the, on the screen for you, and so just make sure you guys, just you know the audio is one thing, but show us some love on youtube. Look up quentin floors on youtube and you'll be able to check out the show. With that being said, man, today I have a really badass guest man. Go ahead and introduce yourself to the world, bro.
Speaker 1:My name is eric sangerhausen. I love it, man, and there's so much more that gets added on to that. I just gotta, straight up, make sure that we reiterate on this. This dude right here is a local legend. He's seen me since the beginning and it's just been amazing, bro. I know you have a lot going on, bro. Like, what are some of the things that you're working on right now?
Speaker 2:So right now my main focus is on building my real estate brokerage, White Line Realty, as well as bringing back to life. One of my very first businesses that I ever started was a pest control business called deep six pest control, and then I still do my owner finance land flipping things like that. But those are going to be my two. Biggest focuses in the near future is growing the brokerage number one and in the pest control business as well dude, I've seen you like doing so many awesome things.
Speaker 1:When I first got in the game, you to to me were like a senior, like you were somebody that had already been trucking. I don't mean to, but I mean like you still look very young actually, bro, that's because I shaved.
Speaker 1:I feel old and I'm 33, you know I don't know what I mean, we don't have to talk about it, but I'm just saying, like for me, me, you know, as someone who had been in the game, you were already very well established when I was barely getting started. You know, and so, like bro, I know you talked about you had like a pest control business. How did that even start?
Speaker 2:So I went to real estate school right out of high school. Um, it was in Austin and, as you can imagine, a 18 year old kid in Austin for the first time from a small town to a big town. I didn't do very good with all the parting and everything.
Speaker 2:So I did finish the school but I never passed. I came back, buddy of mine had a job with a pest control business. He's like dude, come do this, it's good money. So that's how I got started in it. I worked for another company for a while, realized I had a passion for it, I liked it, I was good at it, I was good at sales and uh, started my own with a truck and a handheld sprayer and kind of built that business up. Um, failed a bunch of times, learned you know a lot of things not to do. Like we were talking about earlier. Foundations, you know when building a business are important. But uh, my passion was always real estate. Right yeah, and I never had the money to do it. So pest control was my means to the to the end. Right it was. It was a way I was going to make money to then go invest in real estate.
Speaker 1:It's such an intricate business, dude. I have a friend that works next door. His name's Leon Super cool dude. He's been my best friend since I was 12. His dad is from Mexico and he had a pest control business out there making hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. Doing pest control brought the business here to america, didn't do so well but, dude, in 2010, bro and I've never said this on camera before I had a bed bug infestation.
Speaker 1:I saw a brand new king mattress right. Somebody had it wrapped up in plastic and it looked like it hadn't even been opened yet, and it was next to a dumpster. I went and I grabbed that, cleaned it. I cleaned it, bro, I bleached the whole thing and made sure that it was new, put it in my room, fell asleep on it. After a while, I would see these little black fuckers walking around, dude, and I had no idea what they were because I'd never seen a visual bed bug. And so, dude, these little fuckers were like little cockroaches, bro. I'd wake up and they were crawling all over my stomach. Next thing, you know, they were in my sink, they were in my kitchen, they were in my, my fridge, everywhere, bro and dude, that was one of the worst times of my life.
Speaker 2:I had to abandon that house for like I think three months hard to get rid of I've heard, and so I heard.
Speaker 1:There was multiple ways that you can kill them. You can spray, but that isn't gonna. They just hide and then come back and you keep coming back to spray. I had talked to this one company that was trying to charge me like three to four grand just to heat up my house and burn them alive.
Speaker 2:Yep, so do that too I, man, bed bugs are tough. I try to stay away from them because they're so hard to get rid of. You know, I like to be able to do something where I can say, hey, I can guarantee you they're going to be gone, and bed bugs, man, they're going to make you earn every word of that. Um, and I just, I eventually want to probably, you know, offer more of that service, but and I, I leave it alone for now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I run like hey I have bed bugs.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry, I can't hear you my phone's breaking.
Speaker 1:Hey, you know, bro, I I'll tell you that was the worst. And even my, my, my friend leon's dad, he came back like 13 times to spray and they kept coming back. Eventually I just moved out and I left everything there, thousands of dollars of furniture, bro.
Speaker 2:I mean, it was a very trying time intense treatment process, like you have to basically take everything out, wrap it, you know, put all your clothes, go, wash them, put them in a bag and what happens is, most of the time, the homeowner. If they don't follow every single step to a T, you're never going to get rid of them and it's basically like you said it's almost easier just to walk away and start over. It's the worst Y'all can just throw this in the trash.
Speaker 1:When you were starting to scale the pest control business, how did you use that to get into, like the real estate, realm?
Speaker 2:So it was more of a money, like I didn't have any money, I didn't come from any money, I didn't know anyone that had any money. Um, and so I had pest control. I knew how to do pest control is good at it. So I'm like, okay, well, maybe this can make me money so that I can then get into the real estate world. Um, and so I started you know, I built that business, met a guy at a bar right, we all met a guy at a bar at one point right and he had some money and so I gave that business to my dad my first pest control business.
Speaker 2:He was a parts manager at Napa. I said, hey, come over here, do this, I'm gonna hook you up. And then went into the real estate world and just got my ass kicked, you know. So I ended up coming back starting another pest control business, um adding lawn care and irrigation, and, you know, started doing that, licking my wounds, and um ran in. I actually treated an office. It was called swartzenbro true star. They're still around true star. They had the hud contract and so while I was there spraying I'm talking to him, you know, because my passion is real estate and I ended up giving that one to my dad coming on with TrueStar going back taking my tests.
Speaker 2:I already had all my classes at that point and we had the HUD contract, so we were selling all the foreclosure homes and this is back whenever you got paid 5%, so you're making good money. Now it's opposite. They kind of switched it. But what else that allowed me to do was understand the investment side of in San Antonio without risking any money, right, because I'm doing all the foreclosures, the HUD foreclosures. I'm the listing agent for those and I was meeting investors, and so it got me in the game without me getting in the game. That's where I met Mike, and then we started brainstorming and we started Alamo HomeSource, and then you know I don't know how far into that you want to go, cause that's 12 year run of a big business- I think it's still amazing, Cause I saw y'all move and when I got into the business y'all had an office on San Pedro.
Speaker 2:We started off in an apartment. Oh wow, breckenridge park off I-10.
Speaker 1:That's crazy, man. You guys already had a whole staff too. I would walk into that building, I would just drop off the paperwork for the deals that I would sell to you guys and, uh, I mean, y'all were always buying, you know, and we were never stopped. There was no competition in in the wholesaling space back then, unless you were like these wholesale brokerages that exist now.
Speaker 1:Um, I was doing just fine, knocking on doors and then putting up banded signs yeah, nowadays it's like everybody's pulling records from some online space and it's like whoever has the largest call center is gonna. You know, to me it's just it lost. It lost a lot of that. I think the passion is what I lost in the wholesaling space, why I have this podcast and why I do all the stuff that I do online. I still do real estate. I still have a real estate office next door. We're doing wholesale deals, I buy properties to hold and I flip.
Speaker 1:That's my strategies in real estate and I still believe that real estate is one of the best investments that anybody can make into their future. Absolutely, because you leave such a strong legacy. There's so many loopholes and there's so many tax benefits to owning real estate and you know my portfolio that I've been able to build out over the last couple of years definitely sets my family up in a good position. So I'm not knocking it. I'll just say that the wholesale space in particular, it's just not what it used to be. It was really built around good relationships back then, you know.
Speaker 2:It's a lot more.
Speaker 1:You know computer software side now where it used to be more boots on the ground and this us talking and meeting each other, which is what I fell in love with you know people still do bandit signs yeah you can still do the door knocking, but it's hard to compete when you're out there knocking on a door and 50 people have already called them yeah, that is true, that is true.
Speaker 1:and you know, we are in a software age which I think it just makes people lazy, to be honest, and uh, I mean I'm, I'm, I'm a product of when, when that stuff was still going on, you know so bootstrapping the old guys and we had to walk uphill to school both ways, right, Are we?
Speaker 2:I probably saw the end of it.
Speaker 1:You were in that. That, you know, because I wouldn't have met you had, I would have not been bootstrapping it. You know, I I was real big on shaking hands and and making face with the people that I knew in in the in the game that were here, and one person led me to another, you know, and so I was very successful at the beginning and I think that that that method can still be honored now for everybody. For everybody that's listening and watching, right now it's just uh, you know, it's just thing, it's just the convenience factor. That's listening and watching. Right now it's just uh, you know, it's just thing, it's just the convenience factor, that's it, man. You, sometimes you got to do the shit that's inconvenient Cause that's the shit that's going to make you a better man.
Speaker 1:It's going to make you grow more, and I'm real big on doing face-to-face stuff. You know what I'm saying and like, uh, I could have put you in a whole text thread and told you about my event coming up. I didn't want to do that. I texted you directly. I said, dude, you've always supported me, you've bought in so many houses for me. I want you to be at my event. Aaron was like bro, we could just send a mass text. I'm like dude, not fam, I'm reaching out to Eric.
Speaker 2:I'm reaching out to Eric personally because I want him to know.
Speaker 1:I want him at my event.
Speaker 2:You know, like the handwritten notes, things like that, those little things that you know people sleep on. But you know, a mass text versus a personal direct text goes, goes a long way.
Speaker 1:I'm pretty sure that's also how you were able to catch it, because if you were born of that time and you have that in you, I'm positive that the pest control business would grow word of mouth because of the jobs that you were doing Well the cool thing about now versus when I started?
Speaker 2:the first one is the technology. So the first one I was printing out invoices. I was mailing postcards for when your next service was bro, like my whole pest control business is on my phone.
Speaker 2:Like I have an app that runs everything I don't have to do like it's insane. So I'm excited to like. The scalability is going to be massive with this one, with this go around. Um, so it, yeah, it's just different. I mean, I don't know. There's just so many different. It's almost too much. You know a lot of times like, yeah, we're on this app and this app and this app and this app, and you're like, oh my god, there's a lot of apps there's a lot going on.
Speaker 1:I don't even eat that many appetizers, damn no. But dude, I uh, you know, I remember like I was probably during the midwind of that uh, the the alamo home source run, you know, and going in there and seeing the operation that you had, it always blew my mind.
Speaker 1:There was a whole wall that was filled of people that you guys helped buy their first property man, I forgot about that and that was one of the things that I saw and I remember looking at and I remember I had my my wife with me, cause we walked in one time. You were always busy so I never saw you there, but when I was there I would talk to one of the secretary ladies and she was always very helpful and I asked her. I said, man, what is this up here? And uh, I was. It was me and my wife and we were looking at that. It was my wife. I was like this is what I want one day.
Speaker 1:I want a bunch of people next to me thanking me for helping them in some aspect of their life.
Speaker 2:We did that. It was very hard. We actually went and tracked down. You know, at this point we had maybe close to a thousand people, wow, a thousand houses that we had sold. You know people that we've helped, you know, with owner financing and tracking all those pictures down and getting it all and putting it in a collage and creating those. But it was to remind us, you know, as we were growing. You know, don't forget why you're here, don't forget why we do this and then keep you humble, right. It also the other thing was when people came in first time home buyer, owner finance who are these people? You know they're nervous and it was like, hey, we've, we've been here, we've taken care of people. Like that's why we had them right there by the door. So it was, it was good for both sides. Um, it was a, it was a beautiful company, you know. It was probably, um, you know, probably one of the the biggest things I'm proud of. I'm hoping white line realty will will be my next, you know, big thing I feel like it is.
Speaker 1:Bro, you guys are like a storm right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's different. I mean, it's basically taking my real estate investing background along with my real estate brokerage background and combining the two. Most real estate brokerages don't like investors, and so we are changing that, that whole mindset. Like we want investor agents, like we want you to be a realtor and an investor and if you're not, we want to teach you how to be an investor, because a realtor, you can never stop working.
Speaker 1:Yep For sure.
Speaker 2:You stop being a realtor. There's no money you know so like we want to teach people how to take that money that you make being a realtor and invest it, so that one day you could stop being a realtor and just do investments, or you could stop and just live off your passive income I've noticed too, man, like for a lot of realtors in the space, they're taught a lot of just legalities, right, and then that kind of scares them from taking on risk because investing is associated with risk.
Speaker 1:And so there's like, uh you know they, they call it hats. I remember I talked to this person. You got to take off your realtor hat. I remember he kept saying that. That's always stuck with me.
Speaker 2:I forgot who said that but he owns a brokerage here in town.
Speaker 1:Right, but take off your realtor hat and then put on your investor hat. It's opportunity. You know what I mean. And this is the thing. Like with investments you're always going to have some form of risk, right, but in real estate, there's so many formulas that help you mitigate the risk. It's like you're not going to lose money if you just make a conscious decision to not lose money you know what?
Speaker 1:I mean numbers are numbers you make it when you buy, and that's something that my friend david fisher had taught me. So you know, as I've been, uh, expanding and going into the space, I work with a lot of realtors too, but a lot of them don't like to work with me, and mainly because I'm an investor.
Speaker 2:It's such a weird thing and for them it's just a lack of education, it's a lack of understanding, and you know, that's why our agents are special um is that we provide the training. You know, we have weekly zooms, we have monthly investor zooms. We bring in guest speakers, we bring in trainers. You know, like, our agents are educated in the investment world so they can help investors if, even if they're not ready to invest themselves, um, and if not, they go to our band app. You know where all of our other agents are and they say, hey, I got this question, someone help me and everyone helps. We're a big family.
Speaker 1:We've got agents all over texas.
Speaker 2:so, you know, as we, we continue to grow, like we talked about earlier, you know that that community becomes bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and that's that's something unique.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to build it's going to take a while, but it'll be fun. I wanted to ask you where the name white line come from.
Speaker 2:So finish line. So my son ran track in middle school. So actually white line realty was created back whenever Alamo HomeSource was there. Oh wow, we wanted to separate because we had five agents working for us full-time selling our houses. We were doing 100-plus houses a year and so we wanted to separate the two because you kind of get hairy when you buy and you sell and you flip and it was all done in-house. You really needed to have a license legally. So we wanted to create a real estate brokerage back then, just to separate.
Speaker 2:And my son was running track and I liked, you know, I wanted something clean, you know. So I wanted like a line, like I want like this line, this box, you know, and it started off there and then my son's running track and he starts off at the start line, right, and then he runs around the track to the finish line, the white line, and it was like, hey, we're taking people from start to finish. You know, white line realty it has no reference to scarface or any of that. You know none of that. But that that's the. The biggest thing is from start to finish, we're here I think it's amazing.
Speaker 1:To be honest, I thought it was in reference to something fishing this whole time, yeah, because some I I fish with braid, so some of the braid. That guy has a white line, so whenever I'm tossing braid out there then it's actually a good one too. Yeah, I just thought it was a fishing thing. You know, I don't know why I could. I could picture like white line fishing hooks or something. You know that'd be cool. You never know, you know, you never know but that's, that's kind of how it came.
Speaker 2:Then it was with Alamo. And then when, um, you know when, when Alamo was no more, um, I had a lot of agents that reached out to me and said, hey, you let investors come over to you, right? I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, come over. And it just kind of was on the back burner and people started referring people. And then all of a sudden I looked up and there was like 40 agents and I'm like, wow, we got something here. You know, like I need to focus more and put some more attention to this. And so the last, and then COVID hit, obviously, and I'm like, oh my God.
Speaker 1:Oh man, that really just set us all back on community aspect anyway.
Speaker 2:I went into survival mode and like, what am I going to do? And I protect all my assets and protect, protect, protect. And then, once that was over, it was like, okay, it's time to go after this, this brokerage, because there's a lot of people that are like me, that are investors and realtors.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so that's what we've been growing Um, our goal is 2,500 agents.
Speaker 1:I dude. I mean I know that you're going to achieve it, Like it's undeniable at this point. Keep walking forward. It's awesome to see bro like going, like going from having to sell off a whole company and then move in different directions with someone that you established for 12 years. You know how did that impact you mentally when you guys were like I mean, yeah, how did that conversation even happen?
Speaker 2:if you don't mind talking about it, so there was a big age difference between us. Um, we were already kind of going in separate ways you know we had that business on autopilot to where it was a lot of free time and I was wanting to do expand my investment. You know I wanted to get into land and ranches and whole and uh warehouses and you know I wanted to do all these things.
Speaker 2:And you know he had a different mindset, like no, no, no, we need to focus on this. And I'm like this is on, I got this, this is good. Yeah, it's on autopilot, let's go over here. And it started off there, um, and it turned into. You know, he was inching towards retirement age. I was still young, I was in my late 30s, early mid to late 30s, so the conversation had started. You know we could see that we were.
Speaker 1:We were wanting to go different directions I had a partner with that same thing. It happened too. Uh, I used to work with a guy named Jason and Elizabeth Brown. They were a married couple. They were very interesting For them. They were already in their 50s and they met on a dating website called 50 with no Kids Okay, yeah, yeah, because they didn't have any kids and they both had something going on medically that didn't allow for them to have children. So they decided to just adopt dogs and they lived inside of a travel home, so they took it with them everywhere, right?
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 1:They were my first quote, unquote private money investors. They found me on YouTube, drove from Utah down to San Antonio to meet me in person, shook my hand and everything right, and so they gave me $100,000 grant to meet me in person. Shook my hand and everything Right, and so they gave me a hundred thousand dollar grant to start my first business, which was the wholesaling business. Yeah, bro, I mean, I was very grateful. I had already bought in three houses. A lady in town that a lot of people know of, her name's Angela Longoria. She helped me buy my first three rental properties, and so I had equity. They lent me a pro. They lent, they gave me that loan against one of my assets that I had.
Speaker 1:And uh, yeah, man, I opened up my first office and started scaling it up, but they didn't want to, after me finally getting their money back and then wanting to do it again. I told him I wanted to expand more. They were like Quinn, we don't want to do this. We're in our fifties, we just want to lend you whatever we can and we don't want to grow past it. We actually went separate ways because of that. They're in a different stage of their life. They're wanting to go into retirement For me. I'm just like let's grow, let's grow, bro, I will be doing a real estate deal on my deathbed.
Speaker 1:Eric, I promise you this Me too, probably. I just love what I do and I think that the moment that you stop growing is the day that you start dying absolutely. And so you know, like I just don't ever want to not be hungry. You know what I'm saying. Like I get the whole idea like but you've made a lot in your life. You've already accomplished a tremendous amount. You have kids that are super, like that, that love. You have a family and everybody that you take care of. You have multiple people that are now thriving off of an ecosystem that you've built right. So for me it's like would you ever stop? No, why? Because there's too many people that we have to help. Still, exactly. And so, man, I mean, I had I gone through the same thing. Go ahead and keep going.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry, bro no, I don't even remember where I was at.
Speaker 1:No, because we were talking about the, the separation between, because he was going in that direction.
Speaker 2:You're going to be it you know, um, and then covet and, like I said, went into survival mode and then I tripped into land so that'd be a cool story to talk about. So when COVID hit, I don't know I still can't remember why I did it, but I started mailing contracts to all these little trash lots in Canyon Lake Wow. And I had sold some stuff, like right during covid, and I was sitting on about a half a million of just side cash that I was like what can I do with this? I was flipping houses in san antonio at the time, which actually was really good because covid, people didn't want to be around people. And yeah, you had a flip house. It was vacant, so our houses were selling quick.
Speaker 2:But I started mailing these stupid little letters that said you know, here, here's what I did. Was I? Basically I went to the county appraisal district, I pulled the list for all vacant property. I then put it in a spreadsheet. I then ran a formula that said you know, whatever the county appraisal value is, you know, if it's under 50 grand, I'll offer it. You know, 65% If it's over this. I had all these percentages and then basically you can import or export that into a word document where it auto fills, boom. And so, just like that, I had, you know, 2000 letters that look like it was specifically to that person, offering them an amount based off of this thing. So I mailed these out and I got a buck.
Speaker 2:Because during COVID people were nervous, right, so they were just dumping all these these lots that were vacant. So I mailed these out and I got a bunch, because during COVID people were nervous, right, so they were just dumping all these lots that were vacant and I was picking these things up for like five grand, 10 grand, 20 grand, and right around that time, as I was acquiring all these things, all of a sudden people started getting cabin fever, right. So then what started happening was people wanted to go out and start buying stuff and I'm sitting on all these lots and I started selling them for double, triple, quadruple, dude. I made so much money, it was stupid.
Speaker 2:And then, just like that, like any good thing, as fast as it started it was over, I had a couple of good runs and then I started getting letters that looked just like mine mailed to me on the lots that I owned and it just flooded. The prices went through the roof. You know, the five thousand dollar. Lots were no longer five thousand, they were 30, 40, 50 and I was kind of out the game but I but it got me interested in land and I liked the idea of it. It was just a lot of work and I'm buying at any time.
Speaker 2:I was sitting on 20 or 30 lots and I'm constantly mailing, constantly taking phone calls. So I was like, well, how can I scale this right? Like what if I buy bigger tracts of land and then break them up? And so that's how I started getting into buying, you know, 100 acres, 200 acres, breaking those up, owner financing them because of my background with owner financing leveraging out with banks the notes you know holding.
Speaker 1:I got a property I could talk to you about. It's north of dallas, south of oklahoma, it's on the border, it's almost like I think it's about 12 000 acres. Good god, yeah. And the guy, um, he's looking for getting my, my friend rj bates. Yeah. So RJ told me about this deal and he told me if I can help him get the money to buy it, because he just needs enough for a down payment, because the guy's willing to underfinance it 2.3, and he'll cut me 300 acres for free.
Speaker 2:What are you going to do with 1,200 acres or 12,000?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I think it's 12,000 acres. I'm not positive but don't quote me on it, but apparently there's already stuff that's there. There's like a stock pond, there's a uh you can.
Speaker 2:Exotic ranch world.
Speaker 1:Oh dude, you could have like your own city the 300 acres that he told me he'll cut me off. He said that he would uh that, uh that it has exotic ranch on it. So I love outdoors, um, I love to fish, I love to hunt. So for me, you know, I bought my own truck. I got my own ranch out in Corpus. I have in my family, we have 400 acres. It's close. It's in a small town right outside of Corpus Christi. Preferably it's always brush, you know you don't get giant woods or anything, which would be amazing forest full of mesquite trees, you get snakes that bite your boots, bro.
Speaker 1:That's what you get, and uh, you know, I don't even know something about owning land.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the biggest problem I have when I buy these tracks are been wanting to sell them after I clean them up you know we have our ranch in Harwood that still has all the stakes and all the flags to break it up into multiple tracks on the property and we're already designing a house to build there, to live there and retire there. Wow, we just fell in love with it. You know, we, we, once we got through cleaning it all up and going and clearing it and, you know, taking the kids and the family. There's something about land it's calming.
Speaker 1:You get out there, you relax, you decompress and oh, it's the most beautiful thing in the world, man. I mean sometimes I'll go and I don't even kill anything anymore, because it's just like I just want to be away you know, oh, yeah, for sure. And the deer actually walk up to me in my ranch. You know, feed them and watch them on the game camera yeah, I was like man, you should shoot that thing.
Speaker 1:That's my pet, I'm not messing with that, yeah then the the well for my ranch it's a low fence hunting, you know. So you know it's not like I have like a whatever stays there, I share it with everyone else. You know, I think it's a flex when you have a high fence hunting spot, that's for sure, but that's also like a slaughterhouse, it's a glorified slaughterhouse but it just depends on where you're at.
Speaker 1:on that side of the spectrum I I know a lot of people that make a lot of money. I have not been in the ranch game up until like two years ago, so like for me man, I was pushing like post-COVID about 403 pounds is what the scale said. I had to buy a scale to find that out, because the scale I got only went up to 350.
Speaker 2:So where.
Speaker 1:I'm at right now I'm at 265 pounds and it's been a huge shift for me. But I remember when I was younger, I loved being outside. As I got older and I got into business, I got lazy and I stopped wanting to go out, you know. And so, bro, I dove straight in after I got healthy, into buying all of the things that I could never afford before when I was younger. I got myself a boat, I got myself that ranch, got myself every gun that you could think of.
Speaker 1:It's a midlife crisis worth owning. I have which is beautiful and you know I've never fly fished before in my life, man. I fell in love with that mutual friend of ours. Pablo introduced me to fly fishing and I got a chance to meet this large gentleman with a nice sexy beard out in corpus who had this company called the fly trap and I bought my first fly rod from there. I got two fly rods from the fly trap we appreciate that yeah, dude, and that's what's cool.
Speaker 1:Like I had no idea and you show me, got a tattoo right yeah, what is?
Speaker 2:it was a tattoo before it was uh, before it was a business. That's so dope dude do you?
Speaker 1:do you go fishing too?
Speaker 2:absolutely, I did not know about this sunday we're going to be taking our the business online and so I'm going down there. Sunday, chris and I are going to start building the back-end uh website and all that, but yeah, it's. That's what's up it's been a great business to let us build that for you, you know, y'all did all that. I do everything I'll him because, well, what we'll need is probably going down there and shooting all the product. I could do that too, because that's the biggest thing is.
Speaker 1:Bro, I will sponsor, if you guys will hook me up with some fly gear.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we can do something, We'll talk about it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll talk about it.
Speaker 2:But the back end is, you know it's through Square or whatever, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so they have the platform.
Speaker 2:The hardest part is taking all the high-end photos, putting all the content, and that's what I'm going to go down there, look at what we need and then build the team. So, yeah, definitely be in there. I could literally do all of that. Hey, bring a photographer.
Speaker 1:Let's go. We've done that for a company here, local, called Grass. They're a cannabis store. They have one right here on san pedro and uh, where diversions game room is literally right down the street. You know we were doing all of their commercials and all of their ads that they were doing for their facebook, so we can do product shoots as well if you give me the, the flies.
Speaker 1:I have micro lenses that can literally like, zoom in and get all the flares from the little tails. Every detail will crystallize it, make it look badass, you know.
Speaker 2:So like what we'd have to do is probably go down like once a month shoot all the product and then next month shoot new product.
Speaker 2:You know, because things change, we know we get stuff um but yeah, I'll create a whole proposal I'll talk to fowler this weekend and you know, the main thing was just okay, which which, uh, you know, website are we going to use? And then how did? How do we get it all connected to instagram? Yeah, and then, once that's figured out, then our next thing was, hey, we need to hire someone to come down and get all this product like, did, like, high-end photos oh, bro, any excuse that I have to go and hit that jetty.
Speaker 2:I am there guys, I know it sucks, but I've got to go down to the coast and work. Why are you taking all your fly fishing? Shit man. Y'all, y'all, just worry about this I've got big business down there, I gotta take care of when did that business come to life?
Speaker 1:how did you get into? I mean, obviously we have pest control we have real estate company. We got white line. You got the co-working space. It's beautiful man. I've been there.
Speaker 2:Everybody in sagini knows it too, so the fly business has always been when I would go down there, me and a buddy of mine, joe, would sit on the back porch drink beer and talk about. You know, this is how a fly shop should be right, because most of your fly shops are going to be something that, like my grandpa would go to. I don't want to go there, right, and I was like we had this idea of something edgy, something cool, something fun, like I want a big couch that people come in and chill like tattoos and like not orvis, basically, yeah, you know everything besides that like not stuffy, like anyone's welcome. So we started sitting on the back porch drinking beers, talking about this business model and it was like man, one day, you know, one day, we're gonna do it. We both had businesses and neither of us had time.
Speaker 2:Covet hits, chris fowler gets furloughed and joe me and he's like dude, I know you talked about this, how serious are you? And I'm like why, what's up? He's like I got this guy, he's perfect. And so we call Chris and said, hey, we'll back it, I'll back it. Will you run it?
Speaker 1:It's like yeah, let's go. You know best fucking proposal in the world, man.
Speaker 2:And so we, we, we did it. We started it. Um, we bootstrapped it because one thing you don't realize is how expensive product is. Like we had this little bitty thousand square foot shop and I'm like, oh man, here's 50 grand. Like, fill this thing up, man. He called me. He's like, hey, money's gone. I walked in and I was like, oh crap, because when you got to buy 10 of everything you, you know it gets really expensive. So that was my first uh learning curve in in the um retail space was inventory is highly expensive, like there's a lot of dollars that go out. But we started that.
Speaker 2:And then, um, it's been fantastic. You know everyone loves the vibe. It's. It's kind of like white line realty. It's been fantastic. You know everyone loves the vibe. It's. It's kind of like white line realty. It's something that that didn't exist. But a lot of people fit into that mold, you know, like they wanted to go. Just, they're just normal people like you and I that want to go to a fly shop and not get looked at, look down their nose because we're not wearing, you know, the these waders or we're not wearing you know, khaki pants to go fly fishing or whatever, you know, we have tattoos and you know all those things, and it's like we're gonna shake the game up. Um, yeah, and then you know, after a year, fowler and I became really close. Um, he's probably one of my best friends and he's a just a badass dude and I was like, hey, man, like you're, you know, half of it's yours now I think that's fucking awesome man.
Speaker 1:To be honest, I think that's what business is all about. It's finding people that you vibe with, and then it's like you have this own little tribe that you create. You know, and I've noticed that it seems that this is parallel, just watching from the outside, looking in that you're real big on the community, you know, and white line is like ramiro, white line, uh, zagla, white line jubar those are people that are in the community.
Speaker 2:Well, not hillary, but hillary and marco were the first podcast that I was ever on yeah, I love them, man around, they're amazing and a lot of the agents intertwine with your other businesses. You know, like like they're all in this, this investment wholesaling, flipping world, yeah. But there's never been a real estate brokerage that says, hey, we get y'all Like we understand y'all. Yeah, come over here, like we got you.
Speaker 1:I think that's amazing, man, and it's definitely something that's just totally like breaking that barrier in the industry, which needs to be broken, because I hate separation when we're in the same space. When you tell me that you're in real estate, it's cool. You should know that this is a jungle, right Like you're in real estate.
Speaker 1:There's so many things here, my dude and I think it's badass man, I'm excited to see it, bro. What are the plans for the future with what you have going on right now? Getting into the ranch space more thoroughly or building out the brokerage more?
Speaker 2:So building out the, the brokerage more. So again, my main focus is going to be on, you know, white line realty and the deep six, pest control and growing those two um, what I make a living on is same thing. Owner financing houses, uh, flipping ranches, flipping land um, still always going to do that it's. It's something I know, like if if you took everything away from me right now, yeah, I know that. Like I know how to owner finance a house, I know how to do all that. That's what I can do.
Speaker 2:Um, land, I understand land. I know how to break it up. It's a slower process, so, like it takes like a year to make any money on a ranch. Yeah, it's big money, you know. So I like my houses for my quick money and then the owner finance and flipping the land for the long term money. So that's, that's my immediate future. I would say, you know, white line realty is what I really want to explode. I'd like we've got 50, 56 agents right now. I'd like to be at 100 by the end of the year. And twenty five hundred and five, man, it's beautiful bro. That's my goal.
Speaker 1:It's going to happen too, man, cause you've already done so much. Dude, there's a lot of people that watch this show that are just even for the problems that you've had in your business. They want those problems Cause for them their problem is like how am I going to afford rent? And that's a crazy problem to have. You know what I'm saying, and it seems so from where we're at right now to where that used to be, it's like an ocean, right the distance between those two timeframes in our lives. So, for somebody who's watching this and all the experiences that you had, both the bad and the good, what would you say to someone who is just starting out right now that will probably meet some of the problems that you've had, that you've had to overcome, like, what's some advice that you would give to that person?
Speaker 2:I made a post today and maybe it happened for a reason. And if you don't mind, I'll just read that post because it's going to answer your question. Let's do it, brother. And it says the person who takes action and shows up will always outperform the smart person who does not. I'm not the smartest, but I always go, I always show up, I'm always pushing. I'll figure it out on the way. Point me in the right direction. I don't have time for you to draw me a map. See y'all there.
Speaker 2:And that hit me this morning about nine o'clock and that's the truest thing that's ever just popped in my head is a lot of people want to sit there and draw out this map and they want to sit in their house and try to get everything perfect. Fuck that. You know which direction to go start walking. You'll figure it out on the way you know, and if you're new, that's the biggest thing. That that stops new people from being successful is they're so worried about taking the first step. Just go, just go.
Speaker 1:I love it, man. I appreciate you. Eric for dropping game on the podcast. Dude Guys, I'm going to drop all of Eric's socials in the comments section. Thank you, bro. I appreciate you, man. It's an honor. I'll see you guys on the next one. Thank you.