Real Estate Investing From Scratch: How Brian Jones Built 32 Properties

Brian Jones (00:00)

I think anytime you plan on holding a property for any length of time, and if you if you can buy a property with the mindset that you’re gonna hold it for at least three to five, seven years, it’s almost impossible to lose. you can buy in the wrong areas, absolutely, you can lose money. But those people who do their research have a general understanding of the area that you’re buying in and what values are, you hold it for any period of time, you’re gonna make money.

Issa Hanna (01:58)

Welcome back to another episode of the Real Estate Pro Show. I’m your host, Issa Hanna, and today we have Brian Jones here to share his knowledge with us. Brian, welcome to the show.

Brian Jones (02:07)

What’s up, man?

Issa Hanna (02:09)

What’s going on? I’m super excited to have you, man. wealth and knowledge in the real estate investing space. started from the ground up, started from a whole different parallel universe. So you started from the insurance agency, but for the viewers at home, can you kind of give them a rundown of what your business is today and then what a day-to-day looks like in Brian Jones’s world?

Brian Jones (02:31)

Yeah, absolutely, man. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. like you said, we have insurance agency and that’s kind of where where we started, developing the capital to be able to invest. But a day-to-day for me, we have single family, we have multifamily, we have a coastal property, and then like I said earlier, we’re doing land home packages. So putting those packages together, brand new mobile homes on land.

and flipping those and that’s kind of the pivot that we’ve made. right now, I mean we have two employees that work with us and a day to day for us is that they handle most of the day to day with where it comes to the real estate business. as far as the insurance agency goes, I handle most of the day to day with that.

Issa Hanna (03:17)

I love that. And then when we were talking earlier, you said what made you decide to get into real estate i is just dealing with some clients and seeing that the ones that were living, the good life, the ones that seem to have it together are the ones that had real estate. can you kinda give me that story for the viewers?

Brian Jones (03:34)

Absolutely, man. been in insurance. right now we have two locations for about fifteen years and probably somewhere in the neighborhood of eight or nine years ago, as I’m meeting with customers, just talking about the assets that they have that we need to protect, I started realizing, man, all those guys that they’re comfortable in retirement. If they were sixties plus, they had real estate of some form or fashion.

I had a customer who was a timber buyer and he would buy buy land, cut the timber off of it, and then sell the land. He would hold some land, wait on it to appreciate, then sell it. had multiple customers who had multifamily property. had a lot of customers who had, twelve or fifteen single family houses, and that’s just the retirement that they lived off of. It’s just operating those. specifically remember a customer that had a large automobile accident.

And she had five vacation properties paid for. she actually used one of those and liquidated one of those to pay for that automobile accident. but just seeing those customers that have the real estate and they’re comfortable in retirement, that’s what motivated me to start looking to buy real estate. so

Issa Hanna (04:51)

I love that, man. and definitely is a great asset to hold. there’s pillars wealth. Real estate is one of the major pillars of wealth. a lot of people in the professional space, we think like that. Me as a real estate agent, I thought the same way. And that’s why I decided to make my real estate investment. So we were talking earlier. I said, man, I totally understand that line of thinking. I love it. And to our viewers at home, if you guys got some extra capital and you need to invest in something safe that’s

gonna make you money when you’re older. you’ve heard it a million times, but this is a real estate show. So I gotta tell you, right? invest into real estate.

Brian Jones (05:28)

I think anytime you plan on holding a property for any length of time, and if you if you can buy a property with the mindset that you’re gonna hold it for at least three to five, seven years, it’s almost impossible to lose. you can buy in the wrong areas, absolutely, you can lose money. But those people who do their research have a general understanding of the area that you’re buying in and what values are, you hold it for any period of time, you’re gonna make money.

Issa Hanna (05:56)

It’s all about the whole, building that equity, and then buying right, having that knowledge to buy right. And then once you accumulate enough knowledge in the real estate game, you can definitely speculate pretty good. you can be almost spot on, especially when you’re an expert your own lane. another strength though, I want to talk about you told me you had. You said you have the ability to figure it out, which is the number one strength you have to have as a real estate investor, right?

Because we all have these and I want you to share one that sticks out in your mind the real estate nightmare. give us one of yours.

Brian Jones (07:18)

I mean, dude, anytime you purchase an asset like real estate, there’s so many facets of that asset that have to be taken care of, right? I can vividly remember I bought a quadplex and it’s Thanksgiving morning. It never happens on a day that’s that’s not a day you don’t want it to happen on, right? So it’s Thanksgiving morning and we’re getting ready to go, we’re getting ready to go eat.

lunch at my my wife’s family’s house and I get a phone call from one of my tenants and she’s complaining that her toilet the water won’t go down. And I said, Well, what have you done? And she said, Well I flush the toilet and the to the toilet won’t go down. I said, Okay, well I’ll get a plumber out there, but it’s Thanksgiving. Maybe we could maybe we could wait until tomorrow, I don’t know how many plumbers I’m gonna be able to find.

Thirty minutes later she calls me back and she said the the toilet is overflowing. And not only is the toilet overflowing, but there’s some nasty stuff coming with it. And this is Thanksgiving, right? So have to figure it out. go call a plumber. fast the name of the company I’m not gonna mention on the show, but call them. They go over there, they figure out that obviously she’s got a blockage, so they

Knocked the blockage out and they get everything out. And week goes by, she calls me again. Hey, plu the toilet’s backed up again. said, Okay, I called that company back out there. They go back out there, they knock the blockage out again. Two weeks goes by and she calls me, she said, Hey, the toilet’s backing up again. I’m like, Well, this is the third phone call in a matter of a month. What is going on? So I call a friend of mine who is a plumber.

For a different company that’s a privately held company. They have multiple properties that they keep up and they don’t do work for the public. And I’m like, man, can you just do me a favor? Can you go out there? Let’s see what’s wrong. he calls me back and he said, Brian, there’s a route that has grown through the pipe between the house and the road. So every time that they go out there, they were just knocking that blockage out, but then there’s a small area for the for the rest of the substance to flow through.

If I would have continued to call that same plumber, I don’t know if they would have ever figured that out, but him going out there and running a camera down in there, figuring out that there’s a blockage. it’s just you as a real estate a real estate investor, you have to have the ability to be able to figure things out. You can’t just lean on what people are telling you. and I think that probably comes from my upbringing. I didn’t have a whole lot of guidance. from an investment perspective as I was growing up. my dad w worked in a

Steel mill, my mom was a teacher. going though I don’t have a four-year degree, I don’t have a college degree, but own two businesses. just the ability to read, learn from other people, take notes, shake hands, go back, ask questions. I think that’s the number one key to being a real estate investor is is being able to figure those things out.

Issa Hanna (09:58)

Hundred percent the education, and You can get a million college degrees. It’s not going to teach you what you learned firsthand. What that problem, that nightmare that you just had. and as a fellow landlord, I share that same pain because I just had to repair the same problem. So this is a drain that goes from your house to the sewer. Everything that comes out of your house goes straight into the sewer, into the street, right? So

When you have to dig that whole thing out, hopefully you didn’t have to do the whole thing, but it sometimes it’s like fifty feet. so it’s it’s a labor intensive thing, your whole front yard gets dug up, and it’s not cheap. So the fact that the plumbing company, shame on them, by the way, classy that you would have mentioned them, went out there three different times and didn’t figure that out, unbelievable. and that’s one of the pains of being a landlord that

I could definitely relate to you with Brian. reading books, education, we touched on that. great advice you gave them about educating yourself. It’s out there. you can find it and you’ve got living proof right in front of you that you don’t have to have somebody in the game. You don’t have to go to school. You can teach yourself and you can do it on your own. I want to pick your brain about another piece of advice for our young guys.

Brian Jones (11:09)

Okay.

Issa Hanna (11:10)

business relationships,

you leaned on your relationship to solve that nightmare problem. super important to know people, to establish a network. so for this person just starting out, what would you tell on getting the ball rolling, on establishing their first business relationship?

Brian Jones (12:05)

I think your first business relationship in the real estate industry has to be a real estate agent. I think without a good real estate agent, and oftentimes people, I hear people in in that are getting into real estate and they’re or they gripe about the the money that they have to pay a real estate agent, right? Okay. A real estate agent can be, if they understand your mindset, can be your greatest partner and asset.

and I’m of the opinion in real estate, because there’s there’s money to be made everywhere, right? I’m of the opinion that whenever I do a deal, I want to make money, yes. I want the people that are on my team, that are supporting me, that are around me to make money as well. Because if they make money and I make money, we all make money and we can do more deals together. the the advice that you get from them, because how do deals get to the MLS? Where do they start at?

Somebody calls a real estate agent and says, Hey, thinking about selling my house. Now, if you have that partnership and they understand your mindset and they know what you’re looking for, when that person calls and says, Hey, I’m thinking about selling my house, now all of a sudden they call you instead of going to the MLS with it for God and everybody to see. So I think it’s very important that you have a real estate agent in your corner.

that understands what you’re looking for, what you’re trying to do. And that’s not something that you develop over the course of a month or two. it takes time. but all good things take time, I think. And I don’t think anything worthwhile is gonna be done in a matter of a short time period. so cultivating that relationship and finding that one that works for you, I think is the first big key.

Issa Hanna (13:33)

100%. as a real estate agent with over two hundred and fifty first time home buyers, right? I can definitely attest to that. what made me so good was I was able to find that synergy. I was able to know what my buyers were looking for, the payments they were looking for. I was able to make the numbers and the vision work. real estate agents, take heed of that because if you do what’s best for your client, if you really think

like your client and you really know you take the time to know what your client wants. can expedite looking for properties a lot quicker. You can build great relationships. Man, great advice we got from you. want to ask you now five years down the line. I look you up, Brian. you’ve pivoted into the land, you’ve with the mobile homes and you’re building such a strong company right now.

So if I look you up in five years, where are you gonna be on the real estate up?

Brian Jones (14:19)

That’s a good question, man. right now, Isso, we’re we have thirty-two properties of our own. and I was recently approached by a real estate agent, okay, a good friend of mine, real estate agent contact, who owns a brokerage in our area about starting a real estate management company.

So that’s that’s the next business. I mean, that we’re we’re in the process of getting that one off the ground now. And I kind of feel like that is gonna be the core of all of our real estate business. Having a good management company. already have two people that work for us. We’re gonna expand on that and take on some houses from for a customer that she has. But that’s gonna be the core of how we grow, I feel like, because we all know that the

biggest pain in real estate is actually managing the properties. Well, if that’s under our umbrella and we’re able to manage the properties ourselves, we kinda we don’t remove that pain, but it eases it a little bit because we have control of that. in five years, I would love to pivot a little bit more into commercial real estate and deepen our investment into the land home packages because it generates a large sum of cash quickly.

And then we’re able to then take that and roll that into long longer term buy and hold properties. And one asset class that we’ve been looking at a lot here recently is what I call like contractor garages. like the small bay commercial property where you have an office and a bathroom and then maybe two thousand square foot of of garage because I really feel like and I think you see it across the across America,

COVID really amplified the need for contractors like at your your your HVAC guys, your plumbing guys, your electrical guys. That’s they don’t really have anywhere to store their materials. don’t have anywhere to run their business out of. and those industries are booming right now. Booming. so that’s that’s an area that I definitely want to pivot into and I would say in, five years I’d love to have

couple of those properties go deeper in the land home package deal and then the coastal properties are the vacation properties that we have have have done really well and those have insane appreciation characteristics to them. So we want to buy some more of those and see those continue to appreciate.

Issa Hanna (16:33)

Love that. great five year plan. I love how methodical you are with your plans, right? you’re you’re laying this all out to me, and I was picturing, I’m like, yeah, I can see that. So I know a hundred percent, man, you’re gonna crush it. And then, yeah, you’re right. this commercial pivot that you’re planning, I’ve seen a lot very seasoned investors calling this. I mean, just in in conversations I’ve had, saying exactly the same thing. So

So if they were saying it and now you’re saying it, you guys are definitely onto something, maybe I should start looking into it for my

Brian Jones (17:02)

No, I’m learning from them. They’re not learning from me.

Issa Hanna (17:05)

I love that, man. I love that. and then, land home packages, the investing. People wanted to get a hold of you for insurance, right? where could they reach you at?

Brian Jones (17:14)

you can reach me on Facebook. My name is Brian Jones. you can reach me Instagram, Brian Jones as well. our real estate investment company is named B L R C C Investments. that’s B L R C C Investments. you can email me at Brian at Brian JonesInsurance dot com. a great place to reach me. look me up on Google, give me a call, be glad to help in any way I can. I’m no genius. I’m no

seasoned investor, as you say. We’ve only been at it about seven years. But I love learning. I love connecting, building those relationships. That’s how I’ve gotten to the point that I’m at now. grew up in a three bedroom, one bath, eleven hundred square foot house. didn’t come from a whole lot, but yeah, I do understand how to work hard and figure things out,

Issa Hanna (17:52)

And that’s exactly the guy you want on your side. So you need insurance services. You want to invest. Brian’s your guy. the guys that built it from the ground up, they had to do it on their own, they had to learn it on their own. They bring a whole different type of tenacity and knowledge to the game, the other guys don’t. So make sure you guys look up Brian, contact him. He could really help you guys with your insurance needs, investing, methodical.

Smart man, very personable guy. Brian, thank you so much for coming on the show, man. It was a true honor.

Brian Jones (18:21)

it’s a blessing, Issa. Nice to meet you, man. I appreciate the opportunity.

Issa Hanna (18:25)

It was great meeting you as well and to our viewers at home. If you enjoyed my conversation with Brian and want to see more like it, make sure to hit like and subscribe. I talk to people every day that can bring us different knowledge on every aspect the real estate world. Until next time. The Real Estate Pros are out.