Join us for an engaging and insightful one-on-one conversation with seasoned real estate investor, Shaune Corbett. In this podcast, we delve deep into the dynamics of the real estate market, exploring strategies for fix and flips, as well as buy and holds. From navigating market trends to implementing effective investment techniques, Shaune shares invaluable expertise and firsthand experiences that can empower both novice and seasoned investors alike.
Beyond the realm of real estate, we also touch upon the significance of family values in Shaune's journey. Discover how principles such as integrity, perseverance, and compassion have not only shaped his approach to business but also enriched his personal life.
Whether you're looking to gain practical knowledge about real estate investment or seeking inspiration to integrate core values into your entrepreneurial endeavors, this podcast offers a compelling blend of expertise and heartfelt wisdom. Tune in to gain actionable insights and a renewed perspective on both the professional and personal facets of success in the real estate arena.
Join us for an engaging and insightful one-on-one conversation with seasoned real estate investor, Shaune Corbett. In this podcast, we delve deep into the dynamics of the real estate market, exploring strategies for fix and flips, as well as buy and holds. From navigating market trends to implementing effective investment techniques, Shaune shares invaluable expertise and firsthand experiences that can empower both novice and seasoned investors alike.
Beyond the realm of real estate, we also touch upon the significance of family values in Shaune's journey. Discover how principles such as integrity, perseverance, and compassion have not only shaped his approach to business but also enriched his personal life.
Whether you're looking to gain practical knowledge about real estate investment or seeking inspiration to integrate core values into your entrepreneurial endeavors, this podcast offers a compelling blend of expertise and heartfelt wisdom. Tune in to gain actionable insights and a renewed perspective on both the professional and personal facets of success in the real estate arena.
What's up guys, Chris Bowen here with Level Up the Podcast. I am joined by Sean Corbett today. Sean is a real estate expert here in the North Texas area. He really helps entrepreneurs and other realtors into investing into their personal and into their business. So Sean, why don't you introduce yourself, man? man? Yeah. Hey, thanks Chris for having me on. I appreciate it. I'm, um, I do real estate. I've been in real estate for about 15, 16 years, full -time. And I've gotten into the investing part. Half my clients are investors. So we've gotten into flipping. We've gotten into buying holds. I think a traditional agent probably closes somewhere around eight to 10 deals a year. I generally close about 80 to 100 deals a year. So I move a lot of property. And that includes buyer -sellers. in the retail space that are non-investors. But I really have taken an enjoyment in working with people that are unfamiliar with real estate as an investment. And I've got some podcast material and some videos that I've put out there to kind of explain how they can move into this space with the least amount of money needed to do it. Right now is a buy and hold time. I can do flips. I've got a couple of investors that still flip, but I think this is the time to probably do buy and hold. And I'm happy to do a lot of coaching and teaching. It might be working with people in a more personal level that has nothing to do with real estate. I don't mind kind of working through a lot of that as well. We can talk about some of those fun topics on kind of society as a whole and the way things have kind of gone and where it's going. I think we've got some challenges that we've got to face coming up. I would agree with you there. I think the majority of people would agree with that. So what you're seeing kind of in real estate right now in terms of the market is things just aren't moving as fast. When you put a property up, it's not moving as fast. Is that why it's kind of a buy and hold market right now for investment purposes? I mean, the market in different pockets kind of moves at a different pace, but I'd say in general, there's not enough inventory. There hasn't been enough inventory for, at this point, probably four or five years. You know, it was a real big explosion with COVID where we're seeing properties over three years gain about 30%. of equity, which is incredible. Now, the properties are still at the same level of being available, but the interest rates shot up so fast, so hard that all the buyers froze. And we're still kind of trying to recover from that. There aren't a lot of buyers and there's just not a lot of sellers. So overall, the transaction count in an entirety is still really low. That's why I don't recommend the flipping part today is because it's a little harder to sell. when we just don't have the buyers that we had before and some pockets have way too much saturation with properties that all got flipped and are all in that low price range. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, if you can't sell it fast and it doesn't make sense to flip, because then you're losing money at that point. So that makes total sense. What are you kind of seeing as far as interest rates right now? Well, they're down. I mean, since December, they've probably come down, really since October. October, November, I'd say they're down one and a half, two points from that height. Yeah, so that's been a really big benefit for buyers. This would be, if you're even thinking about buying and some reason you're just not moving forward, because you're afraid of prices of homes are too high or interest rate is too high. I mean, we're at a pocket right now. Interest rates have come down and homes are not, we're not gonna gain. you know, a bunch more properties on the market and market value is certainly not going to come down. You know, people have this thinking that there's going to be this cliff where the prices come back down to prior to COVID is not going to happen. What forces that to happen would be like an overabundance of foreclosures or short sales. And that floats around 3 % rate. Okay. That's a normal rate for foreclosures. It's really, really small. Even during COVID where people were getting forbearance and the opportunity to push their payments out and extend their maturity date, that when they came back around, most of them were able to either pay them or they gained 30 % equity, they could just sell the house. They still couldn't make the payments. So we haven't had a boom in foreclosures. So there's not anything that's gonna push the value of the properties down. You know? makes sense. When you guys are doing some of these flips and holds, or I guess buying holds and then flips, you also work with the GC or you are GC yourself, correct? so what I've done is really any gap that someone has in this cycle, I can fill it. Okay. I have insurance, I have general contractors that work for me, that I have, I don't want to use the control, but the fact that I give them lots of opportunities, they, tend to work for me. And that's been a big blessing for me, because even before I ever got into helping other people, I flipped over 50 houses in my name, and then I probably did another 50 in other people's names. So I've done over 100 flips. And in doing that, I've developed lines of credit, I've developed insurance people that I can use for quoting homeowners insurance or fire policies is what they call it on rental properties. And then they have specialty products for flip products. So I have insurance that covers that. I have probably three or four solid general contractors that will do whatever I need them to do to make a deal work. And then I also have a staging aspect to my business. So when the house is finished, we can stage it. And then I am a real estate broker and I, and I list homes super inexpensive. I give them a really good deal on the listing commission because I, as long as I brought the property to them, I'll give them a really good deal on the listing. So they're going to use me to sell it, which is not a bad idea because I sell, you know, $25, $30 million a year in real estate. So I'm probably not a bad option. right. I mean, if you're buying and selling and you're working with them through the construction process and helping them, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of money to be made there. the real key part of it is that the thing that people don't really understand the real value is I'm more of a liaison and I'm that interim between contractor and investor or contractor and retail. I separate them. I think the number one thing I think real estate agents do for the market is they keep principles away from each other. They keep the buyer and seller separate. I'm working a transaction right now. We're selling, I'm working on the buy side on a house in Colleyville. It's about, 800 ,000 and this seller and buyer would never work together. They both have the most unrealistic expectations. Both of them do. You know, the buyer wants that house to be a brand new house before we move in. And the seller's like, none of that is a problem. You're making a big issue of it. And they, and they're, they're, they're just would never get along by taking out all the stuff that's irrelevant. And we focus on what really matters. Buyer peace of mind, sellers motivated to sell. Then we can make the deal work. I do the same thing with. investors, they have no idea who to talk to. They don't know if the contractor is, you know, messing them over or not are taking advantage of them. They don't know what it means to be ahead of the money, meaning that I've over given the money to the contractor. And now there's no way he can finish the work to cover the shortage. I'm sure you're aware of that type of business as being in the contract business. Yeah. And sometimes it's out of your control. But in my position, I can foresee those things. and hold things up and slow down the process to get it to the point where we're not getting out of balance. And there's things that I do to try to offset that. I also do this anywhere in the country. And this is where it becomes a real fun opportunity. Let's say you've got a mother that lives in a different city somewhere else in the US and she's at a point now, she's been there for 30 years, you know she hasn't updated the house. And now she's ready to move and transition into her final destination, wherever that is. But she's got a house that's in the family and they want to make the most money from that house. And the family has no idea what to do with it. You know, we don't know how to manage a contractor. We don't know how to add value to the property. So people will call me and say, hey, can you help us with this piece of real estate? We don't know what to do with it. And then I will coordinate with contractors. I will get them estimates. I'll coordinate with our network of agents. And then I give them an entire turnkey plan that they don't have to come out of pocket or do anything outside of just communicating with me. And I'll take it from start to finish. And my offer would be, yeah, so my offer would be, I just did one in Tulsa and we took a house, we invested $35 ,000. And keep in mind, these people generally don't have any other way to make income. So I said, my proposition is if we can put 35 into it, I'll make you, you know, $10 ,000 back. And that was my proposition. And we did it. And we sold the house in a week. And I think she made 8 ,000 back, not quite as much, but she made money. And, and she never would have made that 8,000 any other way. And she didn't have to stress about it. She didn't have to negotiate with the contractor. She didn't have to negotiate with the sell side. I did everything. So that yeah, and I've done it in Tacoma, Washington, Sun City West, which is outside of Phoenix, Arizona. This one is broken. broken arrow in Tulsa, Southeast of Tulsa. Yeah. That's where this house was, you know, and I, and I've done San Antonio and Austin, some other things in Texas. So not just for people that are interested in, you know, rental properties that are interested in flipping. It could be, you know, a situational thing where something happened and they just happen upon a property. You know, it's not everybody that's, you know, big in the real estate that's coming to you. It's, you know, the average person. well. Yeah, and I have attorneys and I have other people that can handle some of the more complex estate planning stuff, but I have a solution for any of these things. And I'm a turnkey product because I don't expect them to know how to do any of this, but they could just sell it as is and lose the money. Or I can make them money by going through a little bit of a process and I'll take care of managing it all for them. And what's cool is they don't even pay me. That's just a really cool part. So I... I actually work it out where I'm a part of the contractor process and I get a referral on the listing agent. So they don't even pay extra to have me do it. It doesn't even cost them anything. It's built in as part of the package. I don't even charge them. So it's been a pretty cool opportunity for people out there that just like want a turnkey product they want, and they may not want to put the money into it. Maybe that just stresses them out and they think it's too dangerous. Whatever, that's fine. We could sell it as is as well. I just don't want you to lose out on this opportunity if there is an opportunity. Sometimes markets are oversaturated with flips and they're just not an opportunity to put money into it. Just sell it as is. You know, you know, cause there's enough emotional buyers that want to buy at the low end and they're not going to be able to compete on the high end. So, you know, there's some of that that happens and I can advise them through that. I mean, I've sold so much real estate. I've got a pretty good idea of it. So you said you've done 50 personal flips, you know, in your own name, but you also on rental properties. well, correct? yeah, some of them originally I own two rental properties. That's how I got into real estate, at least the investor side is just, you know, it's the same thing with me starting my brokerage. I never worked for, you know, a KW or Coldwell banker. I just stuck signs in the yard and and put it on the MLS and started negotiating deals. I mean, it's a really kind of strange way that I got into real estate. No one taught me how to do any of those things or even to work with buyers. I worked with a guy that owned a building company and we got, we became, I became darn near expert on contracts, one to four contracts, which is our standard contract we use with, with housing. And I became very, very good at it. I knew all the blanks. I knew how to negotiate them. And then from there, I learned all the other things that I needed to learn in order to be able to sell a house or help a buyer buy a house. And then I started to have the agents join me and I made up commission splits. You know, I didn't. I didn't know what a good commission split is. I just said, if it were me, this is what I think would be fair. And I think originally I was doing like 80, 20, your lead, 70, 30, my lead, you know, where I would take 30, they would take 70 or they would take 80 and I would take 20. So I did that originally and I did that for about 10 years or so. And then, um, and then I started changing it and I started getting into all the liability and I started getting involved in every transaction and I got sick of all that. So I basically said no more to all that. I'm going somewhere else. and you guys are welcome to come or y 'all can go somewhere else as well. Because I don't want to do it anymore. No, no they didn't. No, I had about 10 agents and I made the move to eXp. Now it's been five years ago and I came over only my mom and Joey who was one of my agents came over. That was it. All the other agents went somewhere else. So I lost all of them. But the interesting thing, well I did it very abruptly. I didn't give them time to. process. it. And, and, you know, it's no hard feelings. I talked to all of them today. I mean, it, you know, it is what it is, but, but I went from doing, you know, about seven, eight million a year. I, in my second year at EXP, I ended up doing about 37 million. So it absolutely exploded my business because I took away all the liability. I'm not a part of everyone's transaction anymore. Now I can focus on what I like to do, which is coaching, teaching and and putting more time and energy into my own sphere of influence and helping my own people that know me and helping them make money in real estate. You know, there's several things that I do that I think make a difference as an agent is I give people next step always. I'm not in the dark. I don't know what I'm, I don't come to a site, I don't know what to do. That virtually never happens. I always have a next step, even in the most complex real estate transactions. And the other thing that I do is I make people money. I can make you money on the buy side, I can make you money on the sell side. I make people money because I know what I can do and what I can get away with and what I can do to help them make money. And I think that's a really good value proposition that agents in general just can't do. Well, I think that sometimes they don't even know how to word it and to speak on it to others as part of the issue as well, in that they don't know how to explain themselves when it comes to that. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So we we are we can talk I got real estate all day. We're about halfway through you and I talking you want to continue in real estate, you want to talk about some hot topics and the kind of the culture and things like that. Let's do it. Let's do it. So interested in learning this, you offer coaching, correct? So what I do as of right now, I've created a number of YouTube videos and people I'll offer this to anyone. I don't have a coaching program today. I will have one. I will develop one. I've got plenty of material. I've got hundreds of hours of YouTube videos and things that I've taught and coached on. And I get asked to do a lot of big engagement speaking things where I coach on something. So I'm comfortable with that. What I do now is I'm available to anyone that has a real estate issue or question. And this is for agents. You know, I have brokers and agents and other agencies that will call me and say, hey, here's what I've got going on. What can we do to get out of it? And normally in about two to three minutes, I can get them to a resolution. I don't spend a lot of time thinking through this because I've done it so many times. I typically can get them a resolution very, very quickly. And there are times where there just is no resolution. I mean, it's possible where they're both at a point. Yeah, it's very rare and it has to do with whether the buyer is motivated enough or the seller is motivated enough. If they're both not motivated enough, I can't make it. I can't bridge the gap. It's usually where the breakdown is. It comes to the same, you can bring a horse to water, but you can't make them do it. For sure, yeah. We can show them the opportunity costs, like walking away will cost you this, is that worth it? And sometimes they're like, yeah, that's worth it. I was like, okay, well, then that's where we are. But I'd say, out of a hundred transactions, I'll probably have two or three that will terminate and we just could not resolve. It's very, very rare. So that's a big thing that I do. So I offer basically a phone call to me, tell me your situation and I'll work through it. I want to build credibility with people. I want to build goodwill with others. And I think giving away a lot of that is just a part of that process. And I'm going to have some $99. you know, seminars and things to help people, you know, explode their open house or how to really amplify your sphere of influence. And it's going to be a low cost option that's going to help them grow their business. I'm not trying to get rich on book sales here. I just, I just, you know, the opportunities I want to, I want to impact more. If you don't attach a value to it, you can't impact as many people. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. I think that if there's, you have to have at least some monetization there before people. it as an ad value. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So let's kind of branch off into more a cultural topic. We kind of talked a little bit about this off the air. As far as maybe like a lack of masculinity going on. the world right now, or like an attack on the nuclear family and stuff like that. I like, I love those topics. I'm glad you brought them up. Let's talk about the nuclear family. So even, and I always think about, you know, people live in a very myopic way of thinking. That means they look at the world based on what it impacts them and involves them since they were born. And a lot of times we lose what even a generation prior would think of something, right? So. Me even using the word nuclear family, I would almost tell you that a generation or two ago wouldn't even know what nuclear family means. And the reason why we even have to define it is because now we have others that see that as a alternative lifestyle option. And that's not the way that, that's not the way we were designed, right? We're designed as man and woman and we're designed to come together and we're designed to procreate. And. there's not a whole lot of things on earth that's really more inspiring than just that. We can enjoy what God's created. We can enjoy a lot of the things that we have provided to us or opportunities. But the reality is, if we don't have something that we're growing and building there, then there isn't anything, there is no legacy. There is nothing we're leaving to anyone. And when you die, you turn to dust and no one knows you exist. That's a really bad place to be. I think it's fun, you know, in your twenties and thirties to be single and explore everything and say, you don't have to be tied down to kids or tied down to this or tied down to that, but that will burn off at some point, you know, well, there will. Otherwise you end up becoming narcissistic. It becomes like this individualism where you're serving yourself, which turns into narcissism, which turns into depression. And I have a real kind of flow of that. And I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a sociologist, but I do have a lot of ways that I kind of think about how we are as an operating in the world we are in. And I think we have this heavy, heavy emphasis on serving ourself. And what it will ultimately lead to is a depressive state because you can't ultimately satisfy your own needs and your own wants and your own place. You just can't, you can't feed that. It's like that cup you're constantly filling, you can't fill up. It is. think that's why in the Bible, it talks about making sure that you are taking care of the needs of others, because that's something that, you know, you can continue to work at and continue to work at and not get over saturated by that. And I know you're a big giver. I know you are. You have the heart for other people. You care about other people. I try to. Yeah. But I know that's a gift that you've been given and not all of us have that. I naturally do not have that. I don't have a lot of inherent empathy about things. You know, I did a lot of things the hard way and I don't listen to people complaining about ridiculously minor things. And I'm like, what in the world are you complaining about? Like you have every option to get out of this and you're choosing not to. I mean, that's your choice. And part of the satisfaction for depression is serving others. You were talking about that. And what happens is it stops the emphasis on you and it turns it back on serving others. And all of a sudden you start having... purpose in life, right? You start developing this purpose just in those simple, simple things you can do. You were talking about something else that made me think about, well, we'll have to come back to it. I had, I was going to come back to it. But the nuclear family now has to be defined. And just for the audience, in case they really don't know, it's it's man, woman, and children in a, in a, we call it more a traditional family unit, which I don't, we have to define it now, right? Because everyone's kind of running around coming up with their own, what family looks like. I was gonna say, well, they're just, you know, the little things do things every day. Yeah, well, it's a facade. They play family, you know? And I know that's incredibly offensive to a lot of people, but there's this, we're gonna play family, we're gonna pretend like this is gonna function and work, but we're not designed that way. I can't overcome the way we're designed. I can't overcome that. But the lack of masculinity is a part of that attack on the nuclear family where they see as masculinity as a source of issue. And that's a terrible thing. I'll be honest, even the most feminist woman does not wanna go and fight for the country and kill on behalf of everybody else. I just don't think that's in their nature. They would be counter nature to wanna do that. So when it comes down to it, I think most would prefer to have someone that would take care of them. and be cover for them and help lead, you know, in difficult situations and they can count on someone to do that. And if they can count on someone to do that, I believe that they could provide them respect, which is what men are looking for. And women are looking for, looking for love, right? You know, so. Yes. I mean, we both have girls, you know, two girls. And I think that we can honestly say. know, I want my girls to grow up and be strong independent women, but I also want them to marry a man that's going to take care of them. That's going to take care of their family. not looking for 50 -50 men either. That's a thing, right? We're not looking for them to go get the partnership where we have split our checking. I'll have my checking, you have your checking, and we're gonna split everything, all our resources, and then I'll give 50 % effort, you give 50 % effort. That isn't gonna work. No, so the objective is we're both gonna be committed to this and we're gonna give as close to 100 as much as we possibly can. This is not a 50 -50 deal. But I now remember what I was thinking of. We're talking about individualism. leads to narcissism, which will eventually lead to depression. There is a God shaped vacuum in the center of the heart of every human being. We have a cup that we're filling with something and it could be material things, it could be vacations, it could be things that we can all relate to or think a lot of, but they're not gonna give you that, they're not gonna make you feel full. And I don't know if it's a C .S. Lewis quote or something, but there's a God -shaped vacuum in the heart of every man, meaning we all have this vacuum that we can't fill with anything except for God. So that's something that I like quotes. I like kind of thinking and making things concise where people can get their hands around it. And that's the reason why you can't reach fulfillment with anything else. Yeah, it's so true. That is so extremely true. You know, that's... I've been there before where you feel like, you you have to have worldly things in order to feel fulfilled, you know, whether it's cars, vacations, um, you know, it's premarital sex with women, you know, whatever it is. And that does not make you feel whole inside. None of that does. Yeah, they're all temporary. And that kind of leads to the another thing that's really fascinating to me is we have a society that has two things they're missing. It's conviction and shame. Okay. You cannot shame people in our culture. Like other cultures, you would rather be stoned than feel public shame. In our culture, we celebrate the most embarrassing things that you should feel shame for. You know, an embarrassment. We almost celebrate it. It's incredible. That's why a lot of cultures look at us like we're aliens, because we're celebrating these shameful things. And we think it's a... what we all strive for, what we want in our life. And we don't have real conviction about things. That's a big thing that's been something I've kind of watched over the years, because I really like sociology of things or why people make decisions, why they do it. I think it's really kind of interesting. And I look at and people aren't guided by conviction. They they bounce in and out. You know, what's good today is is not going to be good tomorrow. And they don't have a real reason or rhyme or reason for anything. You know, it's again, you take God out and you have this humanistic culture where we're trying to build and grow on what we think is important. And then they say, well, what is your plumb line of what's good and bad? And they'll say, well, you know, morals, right? My parents gave me morals, society gave me morals. But then when you start getting down to it, their morals today are not their morals tomorrow. And it's a sliding scale. a very worldly, you know, construct because they're ever changing to people. The morals we have today are not the morals from a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, 2000 years ago. It's not the same. Um, yeah. thing is like, they have a sliding scale of morality. There is no plumb line. There is nothing that there's certainly no absolutes. So you ask him what's good for them, you know, today is just it's going to change tomorrow. And that's a real difficult place to have any type of, you know, standing on for a foundation. Right. Their foundation is going to be built on sand and it's constantly moving every time some other thing changes in their life. Now, Oh, well, I used to believe this, but I changed to this because of this situation, right? It's like situational ethics or, you know, it's just, it always irks me that you can live and you're okay with this changing all the time. Like, you know, abortions is not, is acceptable as long as it doesn't affect me or my family. You know, that's where you start having the sliding scale for everything. Yeah, and that's not the way that works. You know, I heard that on some social media the other day, somebody was talking about it and they're like, well, it's not something that I believe in that I agree with, but I don't care if others do it. And it's like, it's not really how that works. If it's something you actually truly believe in. they don't want the pressure and they don't want to feel the heat. So they're always taken this position where, well, it's okay for others, but not for me. You can't build anything on that. And I think that's a really bad place to, there's no conviction. And ultimately you can act like it won't affect you, but it will. It will come back and it will directly affect you if you allow for that exposure for a long period of time. It will fester into something that will affect you. It will come back. right. So, well, Sean, I much appreciate you coming on here today with me. For those who are interested in learning more or that are interested in working with you directly on flips, buying holds, how can they get ahold of you? you? You know, my phone number is available to everyone. It's easy to find. It's on my true West is my brand, but you can even type in my name. My phone number will come up. I get probably one or two random calls a week just for anything real estate related. Um, 214 -228 -0383. And I also have a YouTube channel where I have a lot of this content, specifically for real estate. I don't do as much of this type of off topic, talking about cultural topics, I used to. But now I've really kind of focused on helping people build wealth through real estate, conservatively, right? My YouTube channel is just my name. S -H -A -U -N -E -C -O -R -B -E -T -T, Sean Corbett. Awesome. Wolfshan, thank you so much for your time today, man. We will talk soon, all right? Thank you, Chris. I appreciate it.