Scaling Real Estate Investing: Your Blueprint for Long-Term Success with Adam Devine

Nate: Adam, man, welcome to The Real Estate of Things. Just happy and blessed to have you here to share some knowledge, man. How are you doing in Connecticut today?

Adam Devine: Nate, what's going on brother? Doing great. Happy to be here.

Nate: Awesome, man. Let's dive in, man. You've been in the REI game for a little while now, but everybody always has a unique road and story on how they got to where they're at. So do you mind just giving us sort of the Reader's Digest version of how you got to where you're at in real estate investing?

Adam Devine: Yeah, absolutely. It's definitely one of those unique stories for sure. So funny enough, I'm finishing up school, 2016, and I had struck an interest in, I always wanted to do real estate and really started paying attention around 2014, 2015, following a couple different folks on Instagram that were early into the game, info marketing, talking about how you can go buy homes without any money down, essentially not having to own them. You can go sell a contract, this is too good to be true. So continued to follow it. I'm getting ready to wrap up school in 2016 and I had been playing men's league against who my business partner is now, Bob Lachance, in hockey. So, I knew Bob, I reached out to him on Facebook, never sent me a message back. So, I'm like, okay. I'm like, " Hey, how are things over at..." His former company that he'd helped start in REVA, and didn't get anything back. So, I'm like, it is what it is. I finish up school, I sign up for a wholesaling course and I start falling on my face doing it. So figuring out marketing, how to talk to people. I mean when you're green to this and you start out, it's like you just don't know what you don't know. So you're going along the path to trying to become great at it or at least get traction. Did my first deal, did another deal. Funny enough, end of 2016, I'm refereeing a hockey game. I got this coach yelling and screaming at me up the ice, MF- ing me, and they're winning like 12 to one and I look over my shoulder and I'm like, that's the Lachance screaming at me. They win the game like 15 to one, doesn't shake my hand at the end of the game. And I'm putting the nets up right before the Zamboni comes on the ice and I get off the ice and there's Bob. I'm like, do I go up to him? So I say, " Hey, Coach." He's like, " What?" I was like, " Hey, are you a Bob Lachance from FortuneBuilders?" He's like, " Yeah." Funny enough, face drops. He's like, " Ugh." Shakes my hand. I tell him, " Hey, I'm new to real estate. I'm just trying to figure out the way. Want to introduce myself." Yeah, meet for coffee, meet again. Funny enough, I jump on board, worked with REVA for two years running sales over there and then right before my 26th birthday, Bob fires me. And that's another funny story. And then funny enough, at the end of that year we had formed PurchRock. This is in 2019 and here we are today. So that's a little bit of my story. I got licensed in 2017 as an agent, became a broker in 2020 and just continuing to chase the game and play in the trenches.

Nate: Well, being someone born and raised in New England, that was some good New England tough love that he was giving you. He wasn't yelling at you, he was yelling some love. But it is funny how things work and cool to hear that sort of you knew even through school or at the end of school that real estate was your thing and then clearly hard work and dedication and commitment to finding a way to make it successful to where you're at. So let's continue that. So tell us about PurchRock, give us sort of soup to nuts, some of the background on who you are, what you do, and anything in between.

Adam Devine: Yeah, absolutely. So PurchRock, I mean we're a direct to seller real estate acquisition company and we run this in the northeast, southeast, in parts of the Midwest in the United States. So if we were to break down the states, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Arkansas, Alabama. We tapped into a little bit of Louisiana at a point in time and we used to run Ohio. So, for us, everything is purchased virtually. We don't fix and flip, we don't acquire rentals. We strictly buy and resell. So we purchase at X, sell for Y. It's margin trading. That's the business we're in. A lot of wholesale. Sometimes we have to take these deals down in wholesale, which is part of the game and since we have a brokerage in seven states, we do have the ability to list a lot of our own inventory. So that certainly saves us on the commission side.

Nate: Awesome, man. So how many people are in the company?

Adam Devine: Right now we have just north of 35, so about 36, 37 folks, 14 of them are virtual assistants. The rest of the individuals are in- house or they're located in the United States.

Nate: And where would you group them departmentally, the stateside folks?

Adam Devine: The stateside folks, the majority of them are in our office here in Cheshire, Connecticut. We do have an individual on the recruitment team, our head recruiter lives out in Chicago. We do have an acquisition rep also right outside of Chicago and then another individual, Long Island. Everybody else, they come to the office every day.

Nate: And given just the focus and strategy of the business, I'd say, I guess I should say a majority of them are more on the sales and probably transaction management side. Is that sort of the roles they fulfill?

Adam Devine: Correct. So currently our team makeup in house, we have 11 acquisition, we have six disposition, we got another five, six, we just hired one yesterday, so six inside of the TC admin department, and then we have our head staff, the executive team, our COO, director of marketing, director of sales, myself, Bob.

Nate: Awesome. Awesome, man. That's a great group there and a combination of mainly in Connecticut but stateside virtual, some probably globally and all coming together to make some magic happen. If you don't mind me asking a little bit of a vanity question, but sort of what's been the trajectory of the sort of deals you've done over the last year or two or however long you want to go through?

Adam Devine: Yeah, it's a great question. Could hone in on that for sure. So 2019, I mean we got going towards the end of third quarter and we did our couple deals every month and that was it to try to get our traction going. 2020, we did 54. 2021, we ramped it up, 166 deals, real pivotal for us. You're a member of Collective Genius along with myself and just fantastic group to be a part of. There's a hedge fund that joined the group or joined back up in 2021. We then saw them at IMN where we also see each other. Great conference. They decided, hey, we want you to start marketing for us in some of these southeast markets. We entered in there, we had caught wildfire. I mean you're dealing with the typical New England mentality up here, tri- state. They're yelling, they're screaming at you on the phone, all types of swear words. You got two attorneys on a deal, big houses, older properties, bunch of headaches. You go buy a cookie- cutter single- family from a nice southern seller that's warm and welcoming and you got a title company, you're like, this is too good to be true. So we caught a lot of success in 2021. We also had a coming to moment that we are not landlords. So Bob and myself finally hit about right under 40 doors and he said, " You know what? This is not for us." Went through three different property managers because we got sick and tired of seeing our money go out the window every month and having to pay for this, pay for a fixture, pay for tenant eviction. It got to the point, what are we doing? So we got really focused on one thing and I think it's really important if you want to grow something great, Lima One, you guys lend money. You guys do not do fix and flip. You guys do not do rental properties. You'll lend on it. And that's why you guys are such an exceptional lender. You're a great company because you focus on one thing. We'd started selling off October of 2021. 2022 of May, we had exited our last door and in 2022 by doing that we caught so much traction, we did 247 deals. From there it was a no- brainer to say, we're really good at acquiring homes and selling them. Let's continue to focus on what we're great at and then we have to learn to grow our company around that. And you don't get the tax breaks that you do being a landlord, but one way or another way, whether you're in landlording, you're in fix and flip, you're in wholesale, I always say this. Uncle Sam is going to get his money. You may be the guy that 1031s everything. You're the guy that does cost segregation. That money is deferred, it is not excused. Remember that. So whether you pay today or you pay tomorrow, that money is going to be due. So we figured, all right, either way, we're going to have to pay the piper and let's just at least have fun and be great at what we're doing. So here we are today, continuing to just come to work with smiles on our faces every day and grow a great community.

Nate: That's what's up, man. That's awesome, man. There's tons of great advice there going from you always got to pay the piper, nothing's sort of free in life to it's so cliche and a lot of people will talk about it, but keeping the main thing, the main thing, it is so important to helping you excel and become experts and it's so hard to do, especially in the world of real estate investing where there's so much cool stuff going on that are shiny objects that can distract you. So is there anything more you can dissect in that pivotal moment when you or Bob sort of made that decision, " Hey, we got to get out of the owning and managing rentals into just simply focusing on what we're good at." Is there anything more to share there?

Adam Devine: Yeah, and I'll dive in on that. So a lot of stuff that you hear outside of today is everybody's got a cool new idea every week, every month. Crypto was a really hot item. Then it was drop shipping, then it was ecomm, storage units, fix and flip, lending money. I mean there's just a million things you could do and you see it all the time at CG. You got syndications and multifamily, you can do this and aggregate all this capital. It's like you hear so much stuff. That shiny object syndrome is literally in your face at all times. If you're trying to go monetize on everything, you will never grow anything great. You may make money, it's going to be very stressful. You're ultimately going to cap yourself. Opportunity is infinite. Time is finite. I say this all the time. If you want to grow something great, figure out what is your long- term goal, what is your why and work back from it. What is the ultimate outcome that you're looking to achieve? You may not be able to see it today. You may not be able to conceptualize it or mentally envision it or even understand it if you do mentally envision your goal, but it's something that you can't attain if you're willing to play the long game. If we read Gary Keller's book, The ONE Thing, or Darren Hardy, The Compound Effect, they're some of my favorite books, they're really dialed in on two things: being great at one particular skillset and compounding that skill over and over again. It's the guy that may be a jack of all trades versus a master of one. If you're the master of one, yet you're the master of one thing and you're better than everybody at it, there's something to be said about it. So if you want to build something great, we just had that moment where we can make more money and outperform all the other objects of shininess or options to go make money if we go down the path of consistency. And you just look at it outside of other industries. If somebody owns a restaurant, they're not also doing dental work. I'm like, hey, I'm going to go to this restaurant today, but I'm also going to get my teeth done. Or my plumber says that because he works with his hands, he could probably fix my transmission. Like, what? I'm going to go to a mechanic for that. So when you start to think about it, where do you generate the most amount of your money in your business? Focus on that piece. It's really easy. It's a hard decision to make, but it's very easy to conceptualize and see, hey, maybe we should do it.

Nate: Yeah, no, I commend you for it and I can hear it just from the passion and the way that you talk about that that you and the business are truly committed to it, but it's a lot easier to say than to execute on, but simple at its core but so effective. And as you pointed out, if you look at most successful businesses, that's how they're built. And some good book references there. So let's talk then this. You talked about you're in a diverse amount of markets and it sounded like you sort of started in New England, northeast tri- state area, but then how did you make the decision to go into other markets and at the same time avoid that being a shiny object syndrome? Help me there.

Adam Devine: The big ticket on that was the guys in CG that happened to own a hedge fund and asked us to tamper in. We had always thought about it. Funny enough, I'm going to take a step back here. First deal that Bob and I ever did together was virtual. We had acquired a freaking virtual deal. We had been doing deals when I was at REVA. Do one or two fix and flip a month, acquire a deal. This is 2017, '18. When we went really hard into the wholesale market, we had done a virtual deal and we were like, we really just did this deal. On Fridays, we were drinking on Zoom calls together. He's up at his office in my house, this is just the two of us getting going here, and he's literally on the backside of the Zoom call telling me what to say into the phone and I'm sitting there going at the guy and we're just chuckling up. We were probably both hammered. We're just crushing back beers. Guy takes an offer for like 58,000, we traded at 75. Never saw the home. Had his buddy who's a builder, go out, look at it. Like, holy crap, we can go do this anywhere. And we just never did. We stuck with going to Connecticut all the way to the mid of'21 and when we went into these virtual markets, it became really easy. Connecticut, there's about 3 million people that live here. In Massachusetts, you have about 6 million with 4. 6 of them in the greater Boston area. Rhode Island, I think it's a million statewide. So when we think about an MSA amongst three states aggregated together, there isn't much population. You look at a place like Atlanta with an MSA of what, 8, 9 million, I think it might be 6 million just in Atlanta alone. So if you look at the actual region itself, there's just so many more folks in a condensed area. You can go stay in one market and go deep, but when people talk about going deep, you have to look at your market first and we just couldn't do it here. There's no way you're going to be able to scale to hundreds of deals every year and grow a company year over year by playing in a very small rural market with spread out assets. So it became a game of, okay, if we can do this for this one fund, how many other places can we do this? So again, we're going really deep within our process as a business, not so much our market. We realize that, think locally, act globally. It's true. If we think locally in terms of here's our staff, here's our core, here's what we do, but we can globalize that opportunity by going into different areas. What works here over the phone is what works there. We're not really a real estate company if we break it down. Some people say you're sales and marketing, some people say you're a data and relationship company. Say we're just, we are an inside sales company. It's similar to recruiting. You look at a Robert Half, you look at a Randstad, you look at a lot of these larger corporate recruitment companies, they have offices worldwide. They're all doing the same thing. They're on a phone looking to place somebody into a career, a candidate with a company. Simple as that. And what are we looking to do? We are looking to acquire an asset over the phone and then sell it to somebody. It's a shelter business. We're not looking to buy a million- dollar home. We're looking to acquire shelter and trade it to a retail buyer or an investor. And it just became much easier when you looked at all the other moving variables in these southern markets. Again, it wasn't that easy. It was freaking pulling hair, figuring out what to deal with, what price points to go after. But if you don't go out and fail, you can't learn. I think your wins always come from your failures. That's how you learn. You don't learn from succeeding because when you face adversity, you really don't know how to respond to it. It's losing in life that really teaches you monumental values. So that's a little bit behind how we were able to do it and when you see success, it's the discipline to say, " Hey, I'm going to stay the path."

Nate: Man, you're chopping some quote bombs, dude, like hashtag and all this stuff. I mean this is some real bombs right there and appreciate you getting into that. What is different or what did you do differently to be successful at scaling this virtually versus boots on the ground in market?

Adam Devine: I think it's just time. It's time. You have to go that path and realize that a lot of stuff in the wholesale direct to seller acquisition, whether it's fix and flip, whether it's rental property, wholesale, like what you do today transpires in six months. What you do in Q2 capitalizes in Q3 and Q4 depending on when that property closes, right? There's delays. So we had figured out that going virtual helped in terms of the amount of efficiency and the time component involved in acquiring a deal. You are going to lose out on some deals where that face- to- face relationship builds the rapport, the touch, just being able to trust that person that, hey, you guys are a real company. But we're seeing more and more companies today transpire into that virtual market and for us to stay ahead of that saying, hey, we can go have five guys on the inside and five on the outside, but you're only going to be able to cover such a small little geographic area and you take Connecticut, you really limit yourself. Now, if we were to take that same idea of acquiring homes that we transpire the process into something that's more synergistically approached, just acquiring volume, I can go target anywhere. My marketing can go to Kansas City, my marketing can go to Texas, I can buy a bunch of Austin phone numbers. They don't know the difference of whether we live in Austin or we live in Connecticut. So what else can you-

Nate: You have a little bit of the accent though they can catch onto, but other than that they don't know any bit of the difference, right?

Adam Devine: What do you mean, Chuck? I'll give you a call there. I've been living down there all my life, man.

Nate: I love it.

Adam Devine: Sometimes we turn it on, dude.

Nate: You're a chameleon, man. So I mean what is that? Maybe I'll even specify. What's the main one process that you think really enables you to be successful then virtually, almost globally at that point?

Adam Devine: We got a lot of grit in our office, a lot of athletes, guys that don't take no for an answer and we're students of the game. If you go to the gym and you say, "Hey, I want to lose 60 pounds," you're not going to lose weight in two weeks. You're not going to lose weight in two months. You're going to have to go the full two, three years to see that transformation, but also build the little neurons in your brain to say, "I'm going to keep going." If you don't keep going the path you'll never find out. It's creating persistence and just getting better every day, loving the process. It's not about the outcome. It's not about, " Hey, we made 60 on this deal and seven on the other one." No, they're equivalent. They're all the same. You may have done a really good deal and you only made seven on it. You did another one that was super challenging, but you made 60. Again, it's not the point. It's the process. Everything else transpires by doing the one thing consistently over time and our guys just have to be students of the game. If you're Tiger Woods, you can't just expect to go show up to the first tee on Thursday morning. You're going to play a practice round on Wednesday. You're walking the course Tuesday afternoon with your caddy, identifying, hey, there's a dog leg here. So we're going to want to maybe hit a layup to about 180 yards out into the fairway and then we're going to hit a six iron or not. Or you're a hockey player, you don't just show up to training camp in October. You're lifting weights, you're skating all summer, you're going to your trainer, you're eating well, your nutrition's up. Failing to prepare is preparing to fail. So for us, every day we say like, you're either getting better or you're getting worse. You got to be getting better every day or someone else is going to take your seat.

Nate: Man, what's so important is when I said, what is the main process, you essentially said the process is the main process, number one. Number two, the other big takeaway is the even overcoming a process, it's your people. And I think that's such a great answer. Your people drive your culture and no matter what side of real estate you are in and many other industries at that, we are all in the people business as well. To me, I think it's very broad, people may think of it that way, but you are really continuously embodying, sort of keep the main thing, the main thing and focus on the process and the processes there within, but more importantly the people that you bring on the ship, in the boat, in the rocket ship that you're taking off with up and down the eastern seaboard. And I'm sure you'll continue to grow opportunistically as you find those opportunities. So let me transition then a little bit to finding the deals. I mean you must have marketing tied up pretty good, but sort of talk to me a little bit about what you're doing from a high level on the marketing side through numerous different markets.

Adam Devine: Yeah, it's pretty straightforward. We run three channels really good and we've tested some others out, but REVA Global cold calling and text messaging. It's been a great channel for us using Bob's virtual assisting company. We run a ton of cold calling every day. We do a ton of text messaging. Those channels have worked well for us and they've driven consistent results. We send mail, we've done PPC in the past. It's something we're not running currently, which is something we should entertain. But again, you can go funnel as many lead channels and leads that you want, if you don't have the ability to get to them in time or your are inundated with leads, your acquisition reps, they're going to burn out, they're going to just cherry- pick. So it's always a quality over quantity component when it comes to lead gen. So those three channels have worked well for us. We've continued to go down that path, but always keep our head on a swivel knowing that if something changes, TCPA laws, tax laws, you just have to understand that it has to be another resource for you to continue to drive your business.

Nate: Awesome, man. How do you define quality throughout the different lead campaigns and lead gen opportunities?

Adam Devine: It's just tracking your cost per lead, your return, conversion rates, response rates. We track our metrics with a director of marketing. I'm not the best guy to talk to about it, hence why we hired someone who's much better than me. But we do have a meeting every Tuesday about that and we go over our numbers and we're able to identify where are we getting results and where are numbers lacking. But importantly enough, you do know your numbers and that's what ultimately is going to tell you where you should be investing your marketing dollars.

Nate: So let me flip then to a world that I know is probably a lot more of yours, although you clearly live in a lot of worlds here, wear a lot of hats, but the sales world. To you it sounds like you got a great, humming and just good cultured sales organization. So what would you say is the so- called secret to success in running a great and strong sales organization, man?

Adam Devine: You hit the nail on the head before. We're in the people business. This is human capital. You have to invest in your people. It's got to be the right culture. We call it the locker room here. So we got a lot of hockey guys in the room. We run a podcast called Pucks to Properties, which one of our senior acquisition reps and Bob run together. They both played professional. We've continued to grow by bringing on more professional hockey players or guys that played in college and we really want to grow a great culture and great communities, great companies, great professional champion sports teams have a great comradery, a great gel. You can just see that the chemistry that these teams possess are at the top of the pyramid. We look at the Vegas Golden Knights, they could just show that they were a better bonded hockey team against Florida. When the going gets tough, the tough gets going. So what makes a great sales team is a great team. And then when you have a great team, you can become great at sales when you have the right techniques, the right training, the right ongoing support, the right leadership. It's not just one thing. You have to do everything and you have to be great at it. You have to strive to be as good as you can be and look in the mirror every day. Take accountability. We have our five core values, accountability, attitude, grit, team, and loyalty. Hey, if you can possess those five traits and come in here and be a student, be coachable, you'll win. This isn't rocket science. You need to learn how to have a conversation over the phone to acquire property. If you could do that, you'll make money, but you need to have all the characteristic traits and unfortunately, character isn't something that you can purchase. Character isn't something that you could just attain tomorrow. These are sometimes things that are acquired over years upon years of repetition in process. People are creatures of habit and what are the habits that you're possessing day over day?

Nate: Man, I love it. I feel like I should apply to join the sales org. It sounds like you got a great thing going there, man, and I love the way you look at it and clearly are acting upon it. You talked earlier, and I want to make sure our listeners fully understand this strategy, it's fairly simplistic, but talk to me about wholetailing and defining exactly what that is, how you execute on it.

Adam Devine: Wholetailing is when you buy a property and you resell it for more money, you actually take title versus a wholesale deal where you have the purchase agreement signed by the seller and then you assign that contract to an end buyer. We're actually taking title to these properties. Typically, what we do is we will acquire the home, we do not do any work. We're not fixing anything. We're not doing floors and paint, the old lipstick on a pig approach. We do not do it. We simply are going to clean the property out if it's a hoarder home, if there's just light trash behind, we sell it the way it is. It's simple as that. Acquire it, fund it out, resell it for more money. Our brokerage puts it up and we have to pay two and a half percent out to the buying broker, which saves us a ton of money and we're able to take down some of those tight deals where you see these newer wholesalers who are inexperienced and say, " I don't think there's enough margin there." Guys like us, we're happy making 20, 25 grand on that deal because we know that confidently we're going to make money on it and we're going to put that capital to play to see a return for our reps.

Nate: Yeah, I mean it's very well- defined. It feels like it's become, I don't know the genesis of when the term wholetailing came about, although it feels like it's been in the last few years. So I'm just interested is this the strategy that you know and seen and executed on for quite a long time and do you foresee it continuing to be one no matter what happens in the market?

Adam Devine: Absolutely. We are not driven by economic cycles in the business of wholesale or direct to seller acquisition depending on your exit. If you're in the business of wholesale, wholetail, you guys are doing ovation, same thing. You are not putting any work, there's no capital at play. There's marketing dollars. So if the world's falling apart tomorrow, rates are at 13, someone still needs a place of shelter, an investor still need to place to park his capital. If he just sold off a bunch of buildings and he's getting ready to get hit with taxes or somebody inherits money and says, " I don't want to leave it in a bank account," what is the best bet to put your capital in? It's going to be an asset. Someone needs to acquire that asset. If I bought that asset at 30%, 40%, 60% to the dollar, and I trade at 80, 90 cents to par, there's a margin there. Regardless of the externals of what's going on, we're in a game of margin trading. Crude oil is always trading. Gold is always trading. Whether the economics are up, whether we're in a bad downturn, people are always acquiring these types of commodities and assets and that's what it is. We're not fixing and flipping, we're acquiring at the right prices. People are buying. It's simple as that.

Nate: I mean, couldn't ask for a better response on that. And certainly you're also embodying the fact that in real estate investing, you make your money on the buy, which is extremely important. But to your point, no matter what the cycle is, no matter how much home price appreciation or depreciation hits the real estate market and any given market, which is very idiosyncratic, there's still money to make. And tying it all the way back to the beginning of you just got to know what your strategy is and sort of keep the main thing, the main thing so you can keep getting better at it and learning by fire and failure at that. So, man, we're bringing it all home and together here. In the beginning you talked about you got your real estate brokerage license and how you utilize that, but go a little bit deeper in the integration and the decision to be a realtor and do the real estate investing and how those sort of intertwine.

Adam Devine: Never was really a realtor. I got my license so I can buy my own assets. When I first started out, I got into the business like most others like, "Oh, I'm going to buy rental properties. I'm going to wholesale so I can buy rentals." You soon realize, you don't know what you don't know. There's the things we know, there's the things we don't know and there's the things we don't know, we don't know. And that's just one of them. So I got into this to go buy my own stuff. We started realizing back in 2018 and'19, if we couldn't wholesale a deal, we could have that conversation about listing and you can go make 4, 5, 6 grand on a listing. It's good money to make every month and you do one or two of those, it adds up. Especially if you're a newer investor, those are your marketing dollars that you can reinvest back in your business to scale. I still have our reps do it today. Typically, our acquisition reps are licensed. So when they come on board, we don't bring on retail agents. I do not have anybody at the brokerage that is going off looking to be a president's club million- dollar agent. We just don't have that. If you want to go buy a million- dollar home tomorrow, call up Coldwell Banker, we'll take on listings, but we are never going to work with a buyer. I learned that early on. I'm not going to go run around for 3, 4, 5 months with an FHA buyer. By the time that property closes, if they even buy a property, I may be making 14, 15 bucks an hour doing that kind of work after spending gas money. So it was never something I wanted to get into. Again, you could do fantastic as an agent if that's the route you want to go. It's just not for us. But it has saved us hundreds upon thousands of dollars by selling our own deals while having to pay two and a half percent. And we do exit a lot of properties through the MLS. So for us it's kind of a no- brainer. And I think that's for anybody that gets in the business where they say, as an investor you don't need a license. It's true, you don't need one. But if you'd like to have more exit strategies getting going, because when you are getting going, you got to make money, it makes it far easier to say to that seller that you built rapport with that doesn't want to sell at wholesale but does want to sell. You can go and negotiate with her and maybe give her more of an advantageous commission at 4, 4. 5%, beat out the experienced agent and make some money. So, highly recommend people get licensed.

Nate: Now, there's a little bit of a line that you got to be careful of crossing into sort of the real estate investor and wholesale acquisition approach tied to where you draw the line with your licensed activities. Is that true? Anything to speak on on that?

Adam Devine: Yeah, be transparent when you're talking to a seller. Make sure in your purchase agreements that it states you're a professional investor, you're a licensed broker, you're a licensed agent. We do our part to always, always openly disclose before it's even asked. People know it. And it's your duty to do that because later on it can get flagged by an attorney. The seller can come back and say, " Well, this person was a professional because they were licensed and knew more than me. This is what they did to my property. They acquired it and sold it to this guy for more money. I feel that that was wrong." They're counting your money, seller's remorse. But again, it happens and I've seen people get hung from it. So dot your i's, cross your t's, be transparent. If you're transparent, you don't have anything to worry about.

Nate: You can put your head on the pillow at night and rest a lot easier that way. So I knew you'd have that sound advice and you continue to deliver here, man. You clearly know a lot about a lot, but specifically real estate and acquisitions, again, up and down the East Coast. If you're looking into your crystal ball, man, what are you seeing upcoming, specifically spoken to other real estate investors out there?

Adam Devine: Upcoming in terms of market conditions and where we're heading as a whole?

Nate: Yeah, and how to navigate them and continue to be successful in it?

Adam Devine: I think it starts from within. It's the six inches in between both ears, right? If you have a good attitude and you have a good outlook and you're optimistic and you're positive about situations, you're going to be more likely to have better results. I think a negative attitude enters a negative outlook. When you look at things it's watch your attitude, it becomes reality. Watch your habits, they become actions. So it's important to always be conscious of just your outlook on everything. Regardless of rates continuing to go up, going down, market staying kind of volatile, you can't control that. You can only worry about the controllables. If you worry about the controllables, then you're doing your part to be more successful. You'll actually get your better balances. It's a game of inches, no different than football or hockey, but in order to get those lucky balances, you got to put yourself in that position and you have to prepare yourself to accept whatever happens, happens, but at least put yourself in a position to win. If you put yourself in a position to win, then you have a greater outlook on having better probability in the goals that you want to attain.

Nate: I couldn't agree with you more, and I think now more than ever, with all the stuff you read in the news, the volatility that you referenced in numerous realms of markets, whether that's stocks and equities or real estate, you really got to make sure you're pulling your emotion out of some of these decisions as you are making decisions with the six inches between your two ears, man. So I think really profound insights there as you delivered sort of this whole show. So in closing notes, number one, I'm just interested in any further feedback you have for anybody listening in that's wanting to get into the game in real estate investing. I think a lot of what you just said was about staying in the game and how you look forward. And then also make sure you end with where we can find you, man.

Adam Devine: Yeah, if anybody wants to reach out, you can reach out to me on Facebook or LinkedIn, Adam Devine. You can reach out to me on Instagram @ theadamdevine.

Nate: Awesome, man. Well, brother, I appreciate all that you shared here, clearly showing why you continue to grow and be successful over the years, man. And I expect nothing less than that as you and Bob continue on your ways, man. But again, just thank you for giving all this knowledge here.