Building a Business from the Ground Up and Leveraging Technology to Find Leads with Jorge Fajardo
I am happy to welcome Jorge Fajardo to the show today! Jorge started his career in the mortgage and finance industry in 2002 and in order to pursue this interest on a larger scale, he built his own mortgage company. In the midst of the foreclosure crisis during the years of 2008-2015, Jorge used his vast knowledge and talents to help homeowners experiencing distress due to financial hardships. Jorge established Keystone Property Investments in 2015 and has since bought and sold over 100 properties in both the SFR and multi-family space. Keystone has lucrative joint ventures in place which allow the company to scale and take on several projects simultaneously throughout different parts of the State of Florida.
We begin the episode with Jorge sharing his background story and how he ended up in real estate. He has been in real estate his entire career. He started fresh out of college, in the mortgage industry as a loan officer, and eventually from there went on to open his own brokerage shop on the mortgage lending side. Everything was going great until 2008 when the mortgage meltdown and the housing crisis hit. So overnight, Jorge found himself having to close down shop, because lending had essentially dried up. Eventually, he ended up taking his lending and banking experience and knowledge and pivoting into consumer protection, going to work for a law firm that specializes in foreclosure defense and loss mitigation. With his knowledge and experience at the time, he ended up heading up the loss mitigation department. While working there, one of the things he noticed was that a lot of the same investors kept coming back and he was very intrigued by that. Little by little, he started familiarizing himself with the whole investing side. He started learning about wholesaling, creative financing, and other strategies and techniques and in 2015 he decided to leave the law firm and go into business for himself. His first deal was a wholesale and that first check was about three months' worth of his salary at the firm and he didn't look back after that.
We then talk about how long it took Jorge to really decide that real estate investing was what he wanted to do. He shares that once he did that first deal, and made a ton of money on it, he knew that he was going all in. He started his company in late 2015 when the market started to improve and his primary focus was marketing. He was sending out mailers, getting deals off the MLS and Zillow, and from driving-for-dollars. When it came to raising capital, he started with friends and family. He would ask them to invest their money with him and after his deal is closed, he would give them back an additional 20%. Pretty soon, as his business grew, friends and family kept coming back wanting to invest again. This allowed him to go from strictly wholesaling to doing rehabs.
Next, we talk about how Jorge is handling the change in the market and how he is positioning his company for that. Jorge feels like we're currently at or reaching the top of the market. When looking at prices in areas that he is familiar with, he notices that they have significantly gone up in the last two to three years. His advice for investors is to be disciplined, have a clear understanding of what you want, and look at the numbers.
Lastly, we talk about a new technology that Jorge is working on - Isum 360: Lead gen automation. Jorge explains that Isum 360 is a real estate super tool that is a mix of AI, Marketing Automation, and Real Estate Experience. With the help of one of his clients who is a software developer, Jorge and his team have built a platform that they wanted to use – and most importantly – that produces outstanding results. Isum 360 allows brokers and agents to acquire high-quality seller and buyer leads and automate the process. Also, it allows you to:
- Integrate your daily tools to optimize your results
- Automate repetitive tasks to focus on building relationships & closing deals
- Have all of your platforms integrated into one place
- Higher focus, better results
Make sure you don’t miss this amazing episode of the Just Start Real Estate Podcast with Jorge Fajardo and learn how you can use this new technology to generate leads!
Notable Quotes:
“As an investor, whether you're a wholesaler or a rehabber, at the end of the day, we're looking at the same numbers. It's just about being disciplined and having a clear understanding of what your buying criteria is and what your numbers are.”
- Jorge Fajardo
“Leads are the oxygen of your company, you have to have leads. If you don't have leads coming in, you're dying.”
- Mike Simmons
“We're getting warm leads that are actually responding and we're able to then retarget a lookalike audience. Now, we can go out and retarget as many of those customers as possible to increase our returns. It's been working great.”
- Jorge Fajardo
Links:
Keystone Property Investments on Facebook
Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business to Over $1 Million in Profits in 12 Months
