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Other people study one real estate group's enormous success. Go behind the scenes to learn how they pulled off "The Memphis Miracle". Terry Kerr and Liz Brody from terrific turnkey property provider, Mid South Home Buyers of Memphis, TN, are back on the show. Here's what makes them different: junk in the backyard rather than a dumpster, property addresses viewable on their website, no tenant application fees, no maintenance upcharges, no materials upcharges, no earnest money, investor cancellation allowed, specific kitchen & bath renovation, and tenants bring their own appliances. Memphis has such a robust renter culture that tenants bring their own appliances. Hundreds of GRE followers have purchased income property from Mid South Home Buyers. They're such a popular provider that there's an investor waitlist. For GRE followers, you can reserve up to two financed properties or three all-cash properties all at once. They offer in-person tours to see the properties. Start at MidSouthHomeBuyers.com Resources mentioned: Mid South Home Buyers' Website: www.MidSouthHomeBuyers.com Liz Brody's e-mail: liz@midsouthhomebuyers.com For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments. You get paid first: Text FAMILY to 66866 For advertising inquiries, visit: GetRichEducation.com/ad Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search "how to leave an Apple Podcasts review" Top Properties & Providers: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— text 'GRE' to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith's personal Instagram: @keithweinhold Complete episode transcript: Speaker Weinhold** ((00:00:00)) - - Welcome to GRE! I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. Today we're going to visit one of my favorite real estate markets. We'll talk with an operator there that is so successful and different that other companies actually study them. And our listeners have loved them for almost ten years now. Today on get Rich education. Speaker Syslo** ((00:00:23)) - - Since 2014, the powerful Get Rich Education podcast has created more passive income for people than nearly any other show in the world. This show teaches you how to earn strong returns from passive real estate, investing in the best markets without losing your time being a flipper or landlord. Show host Keith Wine, who writes for both Forbes and Rich Dad Advisors and delivers a new show every week. Since 2014, there's been millions of listeners downloads and 188 world nations. He has A-list show guests include top selling personal finance author Robert Kiyosaki. Get Rich education can be heard on every podcast platform. Plus it has its own dedicated Apple and Android listener. Phone apps build wealth on the go with the get Rich education podcast. Speaker Syslo** ((00:01:01)) - - Sign up now for the get Rich education podcast or visit get Rich education.com. Speaker Coates** ((00:01:08)) - - You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education. Speaker Weinhold** ((00:01:24)) - - Welcome to GRE! From Sandy Creek, New York to Walnut Creek, California, and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith Weinhold and this is get rich education. Some call Memphis, Tennessee the best place in the entire United States for income producing homes. And in past shows, we talked about all of those reasons on why that's true the economic, the geographic and the cultural. So all that I will add to that is, did trends like the era of Covid and this nascent sea of I did that change the advantageous Memphis economics over these past? So 3 to 5 years? No, not really, because this distribution hub market, air barge, rail and truck is still really the center of the most powerful nation on Earth when it comes to distribution. If you're moving a package from New York to LA, you're going through Memphis. Speaker Weinhold** ((00:02:24)) - - The reason that really matters is that those distribution jobs are not transient. It's tough to outsource that activity to Thailand. Lots of things make Memphis well known Memphis barbecue, Beale Street, Graceland Elvis the birthplace of both rock n roll music and blues music. The Mississippi River, the Fedex hub. What we're doing today is going deep inside an enormously successful real estate group there in Memphis. They provide properties to investors. This is going to get rather interesting, because there are just so many things that make them different things they do that no one else that I know of does in the industry. In fact, during our discussion, if you miss any of these differentiators, all summarize them for you at the end. Today, other companies study these people. For example, their properties are totally viewable by the public. You can easily see them physical address, proforma and everything right there on their website. It's just one of a number of things that makes you say, gosh, why don't more people do things the same way that these people do? Now? When I visited Memphis with today's guests, we looked at properties in all different construction stages. Speaker Weinhold** ((00:03:48)) - - At one, there was a giant pile of junk all over the backyard, and that is exactly according to their plan because we were touring a property mid rehab and they don't put a dumpster out on the street like everyone else does. Why is that? Because renting a dumpster is costly and it makes the neighborhood look blighted for a while. They just put all the refuse in the backyard and come by and have a junk collection day for their properties later. And then, oppositely, I also saw other beautifully finished homes where the real hardwood floors shined so much that I wondered when I could move in myself. Now, when you add a property to your real estate portfolio, you can do things like get a property inspection and check out that property today, and maybe even learn about your tenant before you buy a property. But one thing that you don't know is what kind of tenant could this property attract in five years? Well, in Memphis, as you'll see, it is a complete renter culture there. In fact, with the provider that we're about to talk with today, when I visited Memphis and this was quite a while ago, I was driving around with them and they were showing me their sample properties, and I asked them about appreciation in the areas where they buy. Speaker Weinhold** ((00:05:12)) - - I asked what about appreciation? And they began talking about rents. They thought that I meant rent appreciation. No, that's not the way that I talk. Appreciation means capital price to me. But that fact right there is just indicative of the renter culture that they have there. Let's learn more about it and take a trip to Memphis. Today. It's like the return of two longtime terrific friends. It's Terry Kerr and Liz Brody from Midsouth homebuyers in Memphis. Welcome in. Speaker Brody** ((00:05:50)) - - Hi, Keith. Speaker Weinhold** ((00:05:51)) - - Hey, Keith. Thanks so much for having us again. Speaker Brody** ((00:05:53)) - - Always love to be here. Speaker Weinhold** ((00:05:55)) - - Oh, yeah. Now, I've never heard sticks, bricks and mortar talk, but if they could, they would probably sound like you two. And that's because you really are the figurative voice of properties that so many of our followers, probably hundreds, now, have bought over the years. So I just think it's reassuring for us to hear your voice here on great every couple years. And, Terry, this really all began with you 22 years ago. Speaker Weinhold** ((00:06:20)) - - You found that you simply enjoyed fixing up houses. Then you found that others like your ability to renovate property for them, and then you began doing it at scale, placing tenants, starting your own warehouse, which I was inside when it was new. You brought in property management and more. And now that you lead a team that's done thousands of rehab properties and you've even added new build, we'll get to that later. You're still Memphis based. But six years ago you branched out to little Rock, Arkansas, two hours to the west. But with all that, Terry, back from the start, when you began rehabbing Memphis houses, at what point did you learn the fact that, oh, now you just happened to be from an Investor Advantage City, where you get high rents in proportion to a low purchase price? Like, when did that epiphany occur? I tell you what, I'm the luckiest guy I know. Speaker Kerr** ((00:07:12)) - - I was born in the right city at the right time, and was able to cultivate an incredible team of pros to help me run this business. Speaker Kerr** ((00:07:22)) - - Obviously, Liz has been here for 15 years running and gunning with me, but I would say when I realized that we were super fortunate to be in Memphis, Tennessee with all the awesomeness that it provides for cash flow, it was probably right in the middle of the credit crisis when it became real obvious that even though there was, you know, blood in the street, if you will, there was a ton of opportunity. And it came from a buddy of mine who had about ten houses that he had fixed up himself and was managing, and he started buying from us. And I asked him why, and he said, because as the leverage of time, I can buy them from you already fixed up for the same price that I will have in it, if not more, when I'm spending my own time. And that's when really and truly, the idea became crystal clear that passing bargains on to bargain hunters was where we were going to focus. Speaker Weinhold** ((00:08:20)) - - You surely found your niche, and in being from Memphis and finding that right niche and finding the right properties, most people find in that sense that buying super cheap homes looks attractive on the surface to go fix up, but it often doesn't work because you're in blighted neighborhoods. Speaker Weinhold** ((00:08:40)) - - And then in the opposite end, you don't want to go to high end because the rents really aren't that good for the higher purchase price. And both Terry and Liz, you can feel free to chime in on this, but let's talk about the formation then of your go zone versus your no go zone. So we're really talking about sweet spot discovery here. Speaker Brody** ((00:09:01)) - - I always kind of love your origin story a little bit. As far as maybe buying a little bit too low. Right. feeling the pain. Yep. Having to protect the materials you're putting in the renovation. Overcorrecting swinging up to the pretty stuff. That kind of sounds nice at the cocktail party, but shelling out a bunch of money for very little return. It has never made sense. I have a lot that I prefer about working class renters over a class renters, if you will, for so many reasons. They stay longer. It costs money to move a class. Renters are more litigious. They're going to go be homebuyers. It's a lot. Speaker Brody** ((00:09:36)) - - If you're paying tip top rent, you're going to call on a work order because your door handle is loose. And at the end of the day, the lower your rent is, the more people can afford your property. You want to talk about being recession proof. Being in that working class area really, really helps. So there's a lot to it. Speaker Kerr** ((00:09:54)) - - There is. And, as of this morning, our, occupancy rate was 99.17. It'll dip down into the mid 90 eights around the holidays. Liz, you hit the nail on the head. I mean, where you want to operate in the zone where you can have the highest occupancy rate. And, although a class properties that may look nice, but folks don't stay long because they're more transient, they end up buying a home for themselves. So in the beginning, we did things the wrong way a lot. And we, you know, scraped our toes and scuffed our knees. And we're just fortunate that we were able to figure it out and then work it to scale. Speaker Brody** ((00:10:28)) - - And another thing I think that is really neat and powerful about our roots as a company that I always love is so, so Terry, realizing that he wanted to, you know, pass on bargains to bargain hunters, he'd been buying and creating these homes. For himself. You were building your own rental property portfolio, as people do, but there was a doctor that we had sold a number of houses to, but Taylor was not managing them, and they were out at dinner and they were comparing notes, and Terry's properties were outperforming the doctors. And they were identical. They were identical rehabs, identical everything. And the difference was Terry's management doctor said, I'm not going to buy any more houses from you unless you will manage my properties too. And you'd known the day was coming. He'd been thinking about it anyway. But we had a property management company. It just managed Terry's properties and so much about how we manage properties. And that really is feeding into that 99% occupancy rate came because Terry designed his property management company as an owner. Speaker Brody** ((00:11:30)) - - One thing we've talked on about here before is how we don't charge application fees to renters. That's because when Terry was standing in the front yard of a house that he had spent his life savings, his nights and weekends renovating, he didn't care about $50 an adult head from an application fee. He wanted to get the best human being possible in his home. And to this day, we are the only property management company I know of coast to coast. That is a no application fee at all times. Company not up charging maintenance, not charging materials. There's so much that is unique about how our property management company operates, because if Terry didn't say, I'm going to manage your properties differently than I manage my own, I just think that's a really important foundational forming sort of a factor for how we manage. Speaker Weinhold** ((00:12:17)) - - You do so many things differently there that you're really interesting to study, and your primary business is renovating homes and selling them to investors like me and our followers that want to hold them with a tenant in it for the long term production of income and leverage and all of that. Speaker Weinhold** ((00:12:35)) - - The neighborhood. It wouldn't matter to you as much, probably, if you're just doing in and out fix in flips where you don't have any future ongoing relationship with that buyer of your rehabbed property. Therefore, in that case, you would have less neighborhood concern. But now, of course, the neighborhood, it really matters to you because you are managing what you sell. Speaker Kerr** ((00:12:58)) - - Absolutely. And that's why not only is it the neighborhood that matters in managing what we sell, but it's also why we like to buy the houses that are in the worst condition. Because the worst condition of property is when you buy it, the more things you can replace, right? And so we're proud of the fact that we're taking the ugliest house on a street that was owned by a local investor who maybe bought it 30 or 40 years ago, managed it, his or herself, retired, and is then at a point in their life where they want to sell it. Typically there's tons of deferred mainte…
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