Mainstream media and others have been saying they expect the real estate market to keep dropping. But is that true though? Has the real estate market already begun shifting upward and we’re missing it? Our special guest, Sam Primm, shares his real time experience about what he and his company is seeing changing right now. Find out here what’s really going on!
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Is The Real Estate Market Starting To Improve Again? With Sam Primm
In this episode, I got a special guest here, Sam Primm. If you don’t know who he is, I invite you to check out his social media, especially if you are on TikTok or Instagram. He got over 2 million followers on there and has lots of great informative things, especially around the real estate space. The guy does over 300 flips and over wholesale deals every year. He got $42 million in real estate that he owns. He is an absolute rockstar but, at the same time, a humble guy. He is not the guy that says, “I’m going to show up on my jet.” He is the guy that says, “I can buy that jet from the guy that is showing off his jet.” That is the guy Sam is. Welcome to our show.
I appreciate you having me on. That was quite the introduction. We joked about when I got on. If I were going to do a professional podcast, that would have taken me about fifteen tries to do that whole intro you did. Good job.
Tell us a little bit more about your story and how you got started before we talk about the current real estate market because I know a lot of people are in fear right now, but I want to get your background of what even led you down this path in the first place.
I’m about as normal as it gets. I walked that path that a lot of people are on and that a lot of people want to get out of. I went to school, went to college, got a full-time job, was saving money in my 401(k) that my company was matching, was working, and had ceilings everywhere for income I could make or time I could spend with my family.
I’m living a little bit more of that limited life that we are all taught, “Go to work. Ask your boss when you can pee and when you can go on vacation.” I was in the middle of that for a few years. I didn’t hate it because it was what I was used to, knowing that I was going to get into it, but I didn’t like it either. I started to experiment.
I graduated from college in 2011. I did some experimenting in college. We will get away from that. I started experimenting with real estate in 2014 and 2015 timeframe. I’m a couple of years in the real world. I’m starting investing in real estate on the side for a few years. I went full-time in 2018 and was financially free by 2020. I’m doing a lot of other things we will get into.
The biggest thing was walking that path of a full-time job, side hustle of real estate, and full-time real estate, and now, I’m financially free. I did all that in five years. That is my story and my path. I hopefully will get into some things that will show people on here that your path is different than that, but you do have a path to financial freedom. Everybody has a path. They are just different.
Let’s talk about that for a little bit before we get into the current market. What would you advise our readers? Many of these people got W-2 jobs. Some are paycheck to paycheck, and some have got extra. They are wondering how to get started and how to go about it. What would you recommend?
Everybody is starting from somewhere different. Everybody is going to go down several different paths and verses as they are working through it. In general, I would start developing a side hustle. I know you work your butt off whoever is reading, and they have a ton of free time. That is okay. That is what it takes. I’m sorry. I wish there was a magic wand that Chris had that he could wave over you after you give him a five-star review and create freedom for you. You have to roll up your sleeves and put it to work for a short period of time. That is the good news. It doesn’t have to be 50 years. Hustle hard for five so you can enjoy the next 50.
What I would suggest doing would be starting a side hustle. My opinion would be real estate. The barrier of entry is extremely low. You don’t need a credit score to wholesale real estate. My suggestion would be to start a side hustle and have that side hustle. It could be real estate. The actual steps that you will physically be taking would be getting involved in your local community by joining your local Facebook groups and Meetups. Get immersed in your local real estate investing community online and in person.
Get a base level of knowledge. You don’t have to know everything. You won’t know everything before you get started, but understand the difference between active and passive income. Understand what ARV stands for in real estate, what wholesaling means, and what assigning versus double closing is. Get a basic level of knowledge and get to know your community because, at that point, you are going to go in a million different directions. You didn’t know you were going to go in anyway. If you can work towards that, it might take a little bit of time, but I feel like you will be in a pretty good spot to springboard.
You have to ask yourself, “Do I have time? Do I have money? Do I have both?” That determines which path you will end up taking.
I always say, “Analyze your long-term goals versus your short-term cash position.” You need cash to live. If you need that, you might veer towards maybe wholesaling or flipping if you need that extra cash to get out of bad debt, to do a few different things, or it may be to create enough active income. If you have that and are looking for long-term wealth and that is your goal, getting into rentals right away is your option. I hate that it depends on answers, but it depends. A lot of it depends on your current position.
If you don’t have money, wholesaling is an option. That is another side hustle. It is a side gig that you are doing there. It is a business, legitimately. What would you recommend? What are some good resources? Who is a good person you could learn from to learn how to wholesale? We had somebody email me the other day asking from a reader of the show. He said, “I have done wholesaling. I do a couple a year, but I want to take it to that next level.” Do you have any recommendations for good education sources for that?
There is a ton of them out there. This is not a pitch for me. I have a mentorship for rentals. We won’t get into that. It is not wholesaling. However, there are a lot of good mentorships out there. It is one of those things where you are getting eye rolls as soon as we talk about education and people paying for money. I can feel the eye roll.
Here’s the thing that I have noticed. You have been around more successful people than I have. Every single successful person I have ever met, I’m talking successful, not retired at 62. I’m talking about very successful. Without question, every single one pays for some support, whether it be coaching, life coaching, marriage coaching, mentorship, mastermind, or whatever it is they are paying to get better. They are paying to get more time for themselves to speed up their knowledge by learning quicker and better, being around better people, and making connections. They are paying for that because they understand the power of connections and knowledge.
It can be a $50 course or a $50,000 course. Spending some time and energy will do all that. The person who emailed you that wants wholesale more needs to get in contact with somebody who wholesales. We wholesale about 250 houses a year. It is somebody that talks about what marketing to spend, the connections to make, the other wholesalers, the Elder Law attorneys to visit, and the mailers to send out. You need to get more knowledge from somebody who has done it. There are a million places you can get that paid or for free, honestly, on social media as well.
You need to get more knowledge from somebody who's done it. Click To TweetYou are talking about active investment, and that is the thing. Do you have time, especially if you want to do it fast? Finding a mentor is way better. I found out it was a quote from JFK that says, “Ignorance is more expensive than education.” You can screw it up and try to do it yourself. You won’t only waste money, but you will waste so much time versus having somebody to say, “Let’s show you the shortcuts and the way that gets there faster.”
It might require some money and time to do that, but it might save you years, maybe even decades, off of your journey to do that same thing. That is why I know we focus on the passive side, whereas you are talking more about the active side. We don’t do anything with the active side of real estate investing, but the passive side is more like people putting their money and getting to work for them.
The active side leads to the passive side. When I started, I didn’t have enough money to invest passively. If you are willing to pay or roll up your sleeves actively, you can get passive sometimes. Sometimes that is your only option. Sometimes it is a quicker option. Everybody’s past is a little bit different. Ignorance is a good word for it. It is vanity and pride. It is a mixture of the culture of gurus and scam artists. They are out there. It is the culture that those people get the headlines, and the people that are providing quality products and helping people still are not maybe getting those fancy headlines because they are helping people and not negativity sells. A lot of people’s pride and vanity get in the way of them either rolling up their sleeves themselves and doing it or paying for some support.
Before I forget, you mentioned you had some real estate education that you do. You didn’t want to pitch it, but I would love to invite you. What is it that you guys offer? What do you teach there?
If you have any interest, follow me on social media, get to know me a little bit, and at some point, you will see me talking about it, and I will get you a link to the free training. I’m going to tell you exactly how to do it. I bought $42 million worth of real estate, and 90% of it has been in the past 3 or 4 years, all of it tied to my own money.
What I did was created a path through other people to do that. There are 350 videos where I walk through how to do it. There are seven weekly group coaching calls, one-on-one calls, a closed Facebook group, resources, and discounts to my hard money lending company, Faster Freedom Capital. It is everything you need if you are willing to take action to create a multimillion-dollar rental portfolio using other people’s money.
It is everything that I have walked and talked about. I put it in a lifetime access mentorship. I took the best of everybody’s mentorships that I have paid for that I have seen or heard and created one. That is my little sales pitch for it. It can help whoever is reading, but there are steps they need to take. Educate themselves, look around, follow me, and get to know me a little bit better. I don’t want somebody spending money on the mentorship if they don’t know me or if they are not going to do it. I’m not that hard up for the money. I want them to take action. I don’t want your money if you are never going to use it.
Is it better for them to follow you on Instagram and TikTok, or is there no difference?
Wherever they like. I’m on all of them. It hurts my Twitter if you follow my Twitter and never log on again. The algorithms want active users and engagement. Whatever platform you’re on, I’m on there. Follow me @SamFasterFreedom. Instagram is the one with the messenger. Nobody messages on YouTube. The TikTok messenger, I don’t even understand it. They don’t want you to use it because you usually have to follow people to message them. I’m not going to follow everybody on there. I like to follow my people. Instagram is where you can message me. I will respond, but wherever you are, follow me. If you are not on there, don’t follow me there because it won’t do us any good.
I want to talk about the market because there are people hesitating now. Whether they are looking to go to the active route, looking to do wholesale, or flipping, they are saying, “This might not be the time to be a flipper.” Even the ones that are looking to do it passively, even if they are looking to lend money to people like you that are doing some of these deals. A lot of people are getting a little bit gun-shy because of that uncertainty phase, especially as interest rates are rising. I know you’ve got some markets that you are in, in the Midwest. What is your viewpoint on what is happening right now? How is it changing and shifting compared to even late last year?
The market is shifting, and that is a good thing. That is normal. I do a ton of research for my content on the market, interest rates, inflation, the correlations to inflation, interest rates, the past OPEC crisis that has caused inflation before, and the current printing of money inflation. I have done quite a bit of research on all that.
What I have noticed through all that is recessions, raising interest rates, and declining interest rates are normal. House prices going up or house prices going down is normal. Everything that is happening is normal. There haven’t been social media, and all these clickbait fear mongers out there trying to get your attention with a burning house in the background of their thumbnail like that is new, but the actual market and what is happening in the market is not new.
Every recession that I have researched in the last seven has been slightly caused by different things, but a majority of them are caused by increasing interest rates to slow down inflation. That is what is happening right now. The interest rates have gone down the past month as far as your 30-year fixed-rate mortgage.
My take on it is one word. It is perspective. Have some perspective. It is never a bad time to buy a good deal. For people that bought a house in 2006, the national average house price was $250,000 to $300,000, and it dipped after ’08. Last year, for that same house, the national average price was $450. Even with the worst dip ever, 10 to 12 years later, it was already doubled in value.
Real estate is going to go up. It is going to fluctuate a little bit, but buying good assets and managing them properly, works in any market, any interest rate, any cycle, anytime, any day, and anywhere. You have to stick to the fundamentals. Don’t overpay and over-leverage. I’m buying rentals right now. A lot of my students are buying a lot of rentals right now, still in this market. We will refinance in two years when the rates dip a little bit, or the three-year arm will be up, and the rates will be less. That is my perspective. I know it’s not hot takey. It is not fiery, but that is real and what is happening.
You got to have that perspective. You got to understand that shifts and changes in markets are normal. It is how you adapt to it. That is the big problem we have seen with a lot of people that are in the wholesaling and flipping business where they have been lazy. They had it served to them on a little silver platter, especially with the appreciation that was going crazy in post-2020.
You could be sloppy with your numbers and with their little checkbox, your little buy box. What is a good deal or not? Now, as things shift, they expose them. As Warren Buffett says, “As the tide rolls out, you find out who is swimming naked.” I have seen that. There is a big difference between the wholesalers that are doing it well versus those that aren’t. What do you think is that big difference between you guys?
Not to regurgitate what you said, but I don’t think I said that word right, but that is okay. A lot of people could overbuy, over-rehab, overspend, list too high, and still make money. We are not in that time. That eighteen-month period that people could do that is abnormal. That is what is not normal. I know people flipping in 2010, 2011, and 2012 were able to sell and make good money. I know people are flipping in 2022 that made good money too.
The market can be the hottest market ever or the coldest market ever. People still buy quality products. People still need to move, sell, relocate, and all the things that happen in life that people need not be in the same house that they are in right now. With social media, technology, and being able to buy virtually, a lot of people got in the game in the past 12, 24, to 36 months. A lot of those people are going to go away as the market shifts.
We got our stones kicked in. We lost money through the last six months in our flipping company, but we have reserves, and we are prepared for it. We are already on the other side of it. Those that didn’t spend all the money they made in the past few years, those that have created systems and processes and built meaningful relationships with contractors, wholesalers, agents, and whoever else are the people that are going to survive and thrive during what is happening now, especially on the other side of it. Things start to ramp back up as interest rates lower substantially over the next couple of years.
Those that lucked into it, did it on the side, and had a full-time job who are going to go back to their full-time job who didn’t create systems and spent the money are the people that are going to get hurt because there are a lot of real estate investing businesses that are already going out of business and that will go out of business in the next twelve months.
One thing you said that I hadn’t said is that you could have been playing defense with your offense. You have the cash reserves and things like that where, a lot of times, guys that get in the business that are new in the business will say, “I got cash to invest. I invest it all. I throw it all in. All offense.” They have no fallback plan in case something goes wrong. That is where people are struggling. They are scrambling and trying to figure out how to move properties or do whatever they need to do, and they are hurting. When you get in that emotional part of your brain, you make the worst decisions. I know because whenever I fight with my wife, I say the dumbest things ever.
My wife does the same thing. They are brilliant. If she is right, she hammers the point. If she is wrong, she gets you mad enough to say something stupid, so then you are wrong. It is a loop, and I can’t get out of it either. I did want to mention the offensive-defensive thing. This is important. I lucked into this for sure. I don’t know if it was luck, but a lot of it was.
This education company I have now is extremely profitable. We have a lot of people signing up. The mentorship is not cheap. We have had 1,000 students now in the past fifteen months. We are getting 75 to 100 sign-ups a month. It is a profitable business that is helping a lot of people. It is inexpensive for what you get, but it is not cheap. That has held my active income while the flipping company has lost money in the past six months.
Mentorship is not cheap. It's a very profitable business that's helping a lot of people. Click To TweetWe are refilling our retained earnings. Even in the months when we make money, we refill those retained earnings, not knowing that was going to be the case. I have multiple streams of income because I don’t touch my rentals. I can, but I don’t. If everything is going great, I’m getting cashflow from my rentals, my flipping company, and my education company is making money. We started another company to invest the profits from those companies wisely.
It is one of those things where multiple strings of income people have heard before. I have heard it before, and I did it to make more money, but now I’m seeing one of the benefits I didn’t think about. When one of your streams has a dam in it, and it is running dry, you can still drink, eat, make money, and live because of the multiple streams.
That multiple streams of income is a defensive strategy as well as an offensive in a lot of ways. Here’s one quick question before I let you go here. We have some friends in our mastermind group, even from Boise, Wisconsin, and the New England area. They are saying that they are seeing a shift in the last few months. The buyers are coming back. It died out at the end of 2022. In 2023, they are seeing a big uptick, especially if it is below the $500,000 price point. They all agree that they see the same shift. Is that what you see in the Midwest too? I know where you are. Compared to some of those markets, it is not as hot. You tend to be more even-keeled. What is your perspective on that? What have you seen in the last month or two even?
I have seen the same thing. A quality product was selling for over asking. It boils down to the quality of the product and supply. Supply has been low. Back when I have been making YouTube videos over the past twelve months that nobody watches, and all these people are making YouTube videos that the world is ending, the sky is falling, Bitcoin is going to zero, we are going to war, and housing is going to zero.
I have been over here, and nobody is watching it. I have heard this from other people. This isn’t the same original, but interest rates are going up. It is going to scare a lot of people. The buyers are going to go away. As soon as they stabilize, the supply is low, life happens, people have to move, and everything’s going to pick back up. The supply is low, and as soon as interest is stabilized, if they stabilize at 6, 10, 12, or 5, wherever they stabilize, people have to live. Things are going to pick back up, and the supply is low.
I have been saying that. That is not sexy. Nobody has been watching it, but that is what is happening. Fortunately, I’m around the right people because of the mastermind we are in and the people I pay to be around that having that perspective has shown true. I don’t have a crystal ball by any means, but what I said is what is happening. Stabilization of interest rates, people see this is the new norm now, “Let’s go buy. I have to buy. I’m getting promoted. We had another kid. We need a move, or we have to downsize because somebody passed away.” That still happens. That’s a long-winded answer. Supply is low enough that as soon as things stabilize in the entire economy and market buying picks back up, that is what happened.
That is a big opportunity because people are still following the news. They are getting lagged information. They have that lag effect, or they are following old information. They stand out of fear. You have the opportunity to be able to take advantage of it in real-time.
Being involved in the industry and having perspective is key. You can take advantage of things, for sure.
Sam, I appreciate it. There are so much gold and information in such a short period of time. I appreciate the 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 punches that you gave there. You gave a lot of great information and value. Everybody, I invite you guys. Check out Sam on social media. Whether you do Instagram or TikTok, you can follow his stuff. He got so much good content.
It is all about action. It is getting an education, which is good. Get that first, but take the education and put it into action. That is what changes people’s lives. Information alone is not enough. What you can do with that information to be able to make real results happen is the ripple effect we read about in the show. Make it a wonderful and prosperous week. We will see you later.
Important Links
- Sam Primm
- @SamFasterFreedom – TikTok
- Instagram – Sam Primm
About Sam Primm
Real estate investor Sam Primm has successfully invested and now owns $42M in real estate, flips or wholesales 300 houses a year, and has 2 Million followers on social media.
Follow him on Instagram or TikTok – @samfasterfreedom