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Despite a real estate market currently reeling from price falls and record high interest rates, one fact remains clear: Americans are obsessed with homes. We only need to scour the plethora of RE-focused media to see that our homes as a society are both our refuges and one of our favorite forms of investing and acquiring wealth.
Coupled with our hunger for homes is a quick thirst for competition-style television fueled by shows like shark cage, Billion dollar copperand The profit.
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a new show, Financing Faceoff, feeds both appetites by giving entrepreneurs ranging from novices to professionals the chance to pitch their ideas to experienced investors. In the first season, the original shark Kevin Harrington joins the panel of experts who will comment on the RE-themed deals.
The show is the brainchild of RE investment pro Lori Greymont in partnership with master trainer and coach Adam Leffler. So, what can you learn from a pitching competition about RE investing? In a pre-show interview, Harrington shared his top deal-making hints that viewers will observe personally, both from the show and from his own best and worst experiences in his entrepreneurial past, as follows:
When it comes to closing deals, it’s not about you.
“Too many people are so caught up in the passion of their deal that they get in their own heads and think, ‘Everyone is going to make this deal. This is the best deal ever,'” Harrington said. “Investors like me hear pitches all day while recording, and when we eat dinner we get pitched over dinner; I was even pitched in the taxi on the way to the airport.” Instead, he advises, think of the receiver who is busy, who hears hundreds of pitches, and develop a strategy. Harrington’s favorite is Tease, Please and then Seize.
1. First you tease.
“Tease the deal ahead of time in a way that grabs your viewer’s attention,” Harringon said. “So Billy Mays, he sells Oxy Clean,” Harrington says. “In six seconds he eats a meatball sandwich and it drips down his shirt. ‘Uh oh. Did that ever happen to you?’ So he has your attention.”
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In the real estate industry, Harrington suggests that the tease should look like this: “Instead of showing me how you’re going to buy something, you get to magically transform it and sell it for a great profit, let me show you the pros and cons.” after seeing the projects you’ve done in the past. If you want attention and credibility, show me some of the things you’ve already done.”
2, please.
“Show me the details of how you bought a house for $250,000, put $80,000 in it, sold it for $800,000 and it looks like it’s worth $1 million,” Harrington said. “Here’s where to please. For example, one of the guys who pitched us, he just offered us interest. Interest? I’m not like the bank. I don’t want interest; I want multiples of my investment ‘I’ll pay you 5 percent interest?’ Getting a loan alone costs more than that these days, so you have to be prepared to make an irresistible offer.”
3. Now you grab.
This tip is the very best from Harrington in my opinion. For each audience, you do your homework, relate it to the person(s) you’re pitching, and adjust your pitch to succeed at the ‘battle’. So you Google and research the investors you pitch, you look at their personalities and their preferences and the past deals they’ve done that they loved, and you use the information to determine who you should pitch.
“Everyone should be able to find out who their ‘judges’ are. Look them up. The presenters can Google ‘Rotty’ (Ryan ‘Rotty’ Garcilazo), Google my name, find out what I’m interested in.” (Additional experts on the new show also include Mike Hambright, Travis Johnson, Joe Marques (Cowboy Joe), and Jon Nolen.)
“So, for example, you wouldn’t pitch Kevin O’Leary for a cash-only restaurant deal. He’d be interested in a royalty deal. But Barbara Corcoran, she likes restaurant deals.”
Related: 6 Skills Every Real Estate Investor Should Master
Harrington even shared a bit about one of his own past mistakes. “I had a publicly traded company that was making about $200 million a year and Carl Icon, the big corporate raider, wanted to buy into the company,” he recalls. “And I turned it down because it was too aggressive. He wanted too much, for not enough. So a year later I went back to him with another deal and he said, ‘Kevin, what are you wasting my time on, dude? ‘ ‘What do you mean?’ I said, “I thought you liked deals. We talked about deals you liked a year ago,” to which he replied, “You’ve got a startup here. I’m not going to invest in that. Your other company had $200 million in cash flow.” I hadn’t done my due diligence and I had wasted my time. So do the homework.'”
Here are some bonus words of advice to succeed in the real estate market:
Focus is essential
“Look at everything from the point of view of learner and student, as well as provider and professional,” says Harrington. “Small tweaks in deal modeling and during the dealmaking process can lead to significantly better results.”
Partners come first
“Find the ways to optimize both cash in hand and future profit-sharing opportunities, which can yield exponentially greater returns in the long run,” Harrington says. “For example, look for opportunities to connect well-known personalities and influencers to key platforms with valuable products and ideas at an early stage. This gives the opportunity to massively accelerate audience adoption and growth and generate additional profitability.”
Accept both success and failure
Financing Faceoff creator and host Lori Greymont commented, “I have experienced both wild success and devastating failure and learned powerful lessons from both. One of my biggest lessons is that collaboration beats the competition every time. I was able to recover from failure much faster because of the support and guidance from the right people around me.”
Season One begins October 13, 2022 on Bargain House Network with additional distribution on Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Roku, and Samsung TV Plus, with talks underway for additional distribution and seasons.
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