Sharad Mehta hosted seasoned real estate investor Ted Thomas, with great knowledge of tax liens and tax deeds, on a recent REsimpli Podcast session. Ted, with thirty years of experience, has developed new ideas that have benefited thousands of individuals worldwide from honing the complexity of this unique investment technique from an aviation career to real estate.

Ted noted further that in certain countries tax liens—certificates issued by governments—allow governments to collect past-due property taxes with possible returns ranging up to 24%. Conversely, tax deeds provide astute investors an opportunity by allowing them to acquire real estate for a nominal proportion of its market value via auction. With the expected 3 million tax-defaulter houses sold every year, he underlined the great industry’s potential.

In this field one must grasp the dynamics of societies and the requirement of adaptation. Ted stressed the significance of having “boots on the ground” to assess the local situation and property state of things before deciding what to do. Stressing to listeners that thorough research and personal evaluation might assist to lower the risks associated with these acquisitions, he discussed the tax liens and tax deed bidding process.

Ted underlined the good nature of tax lien and tax deed investing even though he advised of the challenges even here. Since most new investors lack the sales and marketing understanding needed to be successful, Ted cautioned avoiding internet real estate transactions without suitable research. He stressed the significance of appraising assets linked to after-repair and of understanding the local market.

Ted shared inspiring success stories all around the event, one about a $150,000 transaction in Los Angeles where a client got significant tax lien and tax deed investment returns. He advised listeners to focus on mid-priced markets instead of the most costly ones if they wanted to maximize their financial opportunities.

Ted underlined the importance of everyone who would like to learn more about this investment strategy attending his six-hour seminars. These seminars help attendees to bravely join this demanding sector by giving them complete knowledge of tax lien and tax deed investing.

At last, Ted recommended would-be investors seek seasoned professionals and give learning top importance. With appropriate leadership and planning, the opportunities presented in tax lien and tax deed investing may be great and profitable.

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Transcript:

Sharad Mehta  0:17  

Hey guys. This is Sharad, host of the resimpli podcast, it’s my pleasure to bring you a very special guest, Ted Thomas, on this podcast. Ted, welcome to be simply podcast. How are you?

Ted Thomas  0:29  

Thank you. Nice to be here. Thanks for the invite. Pleasure to meet you. Thank

Sharad Mehta  0:33  

you so much for being a guest on the podcast, Ted. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where do you live? What kind of investing do you do? How long you’ve been investing for?

Ted Thomas  0:44  

Okay, well, I’m an old timer, as you could probably tell, so I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and I’ve done it in all the states. And my original career was as a pilot. So I flew for the airlines for a while, and then I went into real estate. After I finished flying and from real estate, I progressed to buying foreclosure properties, and I invented some systems for that, and that worked. I wrote some books about it, and that worked. And along the way, I learned about tax defaulted property. And I was pretty amazed to find out these properties are being sold for 10 and 20 cents on the dollar with no mortgage or no deed of trust. And so I started doing that. I started with tax lien certificates. About half the state sell tax lien certificates, the other half sell tax defaulted property. So I learned about taxing certificates, and I went into tax deeds, and so for the past 25 years, plus, I’ve been just doing tax deeds. I’m an investor. I’m a teacher and a guy to coach. I have 1000s of clients worldwide, and people in the English speaking countries can invest in tax liens. Anybody could invest in them, but you’re going to have to be able to speak English, because all the county records are in English. So some people, if they they do it in other countries, you have to have US dollars in English. Other than that, you can do it worldwide, because now you can do everything online. You can buy online and you can sell online. But when I start, it was just business where you had to go to the county records, knock on the door and say, Please give me a list so I can see and then maybe they would be grateful enough, and they’d print you one. It was long time ago, 30 years ago, and so it’s it’s a good business for people that want to want to buy properties and resell them for a profit. It’s also a good business for people that like to buy tax liens and just make interest returns.

Sharad Mehta  2:45  

So thank you so much for that. And you obviously have decades of experience, and you’ve been amazing leading authority on tax liens and tax leads. For any listeners who are not, you know, who haven’t heard tax lien or tax deed before, can you just tell us a little bit about what it is? How is it different from a foreclosed property?

Ted Thomas  3:03  

Absolutely. So some of this brand new to the business. It’s the business is confined to the United States, and what we have in the United States is a business that everybody that wants to own a property, the government wants some money. So the property has what’s called a property tax. So the property tax is a very small tax. It’s usually anywhere from one to 3% generally one or two it’s high enough debt, but you have to pay it every year. So in the course of the year with there’s 100 million properties in United States, we’ve got them all in a database. We can track them all. But the point is, every property has a tax, and people pass away they don’t pay the tax, so that property would end up vacant and deteriorating or whatever. If nobody pays the tax, nobody takes care of it either. So finally, the government will send a notice to their fault and say, Look, if the tax is not paid, we’re going to confiscate the property. Then they will confiscate it, and then they’ll resell it. So that’s called a tax defaulted property. Now half of the states are very benevolent. They’re nice to the homeowner, so that those states are called tax lien certificate states, so the same taxes do, but the local government’s benevolent, and they say, All right, here’s the notice. They send a notice to be the people don’t pay the tax. What they simply do is they sell the taxes to anybody that wants to buy them. So let’s say you want to buy the tax so you could pay the tax on someone else’s property, then you could earn interest on that so depending upon the state, I won’t name all, but in Arizona, they’ll pay up to 16% for that tax certificate. So if you bought a tax certificate, you could earn up to 16% in a place like Florida, you could earn 18% Yeah, looks like Iowa will be 24% so you’re getting the idea so that the government sells the taxes so they can keep running the government. So a property tax is the first tax that they ever had in the United States, the first tax it’s on the property the money is used to pay school teachers, police department, firefighters, libraries, picks, the roads. You get the idea. Now, if you saw a tax bill, it’d be as long as your arm. You know, your arms chewing two foot Long’s got all the things on, mosquito district, water district, all these things, you know, they all get two cents, five cents, whatever. So everybody that owns the property has to pay tax. So all these taxes are due every single year. So you’re in California, you have very unusual rules in California, which I’ll tell you about later. But nationwide, there’s millions of tax lien certificates available. So it’s a business of abundance. There’s also millions of tax default to property between two and 3 million properties every year. So when the government confiscates that property, they don’t have a truck to pick it up. It stays there. But they confiscate the property and then they resell it. The government doesn’t want the property, so when they resell it, they start the auction at the back taxes. So you can buy a property for five cents on the dollar, you’re probably not going to get one, and I’m not going to get one for that, because other people are going to find out. They go, Wait a minute, I’m going to bid 20 cents or 30 cents or 50 cents. So people go bid and buy those properties. So there’s auctions on those properties. There’s 5000 tax defaulted auctions a year. So tax deeds. This is a, this is a tax lien certificate. It’s just a piece of paper. When you buy a taxing certificate, that you get is, you get a piece of paper. You don’t get the property. A lot of people think they get the property. They just get this piece of paper and the right to get income from the county. The county said, If you help us with this and buy this tax certificate, we’ll guarantee that if people don’t pay it, you’ll get the property. So it’s a very lucrative investment to buy a tax lien certificate, and then you go home and pray the people don’t pay, you’re going to get that property for back taxes. You’d like to own a property. Take my word for it, for back taxes. So

Sharad Mehta  7:21  

either you’ll get the property best case or worst case, you’ll get 1820, or 24% interest on that.

Ted Thomas  7:29  

Okay, there’s a bidding process to take place, but basically, you’ve got it, okay, right? So half of the states sell tax liens. The other half sell tax deeds. The tax deed states, they’re not benevolent, they’re ruthless. They say you pay the tax if you haven’t paid it on that day. They auction the property. Got it

Sharad Mehta  7:47  

okay, and you said, you know, it used to be in person, but now you could do online, every county or most counties.

Ted Thomas  7:55  

No, no, all counties. Now, there’s a few in Georgia that just haven’t come around yet. But basically, majority, yeah, there’s 3000 plus counties, so there’s enough counties for right? All online, yeah,

Sharad Mehta  8:10  

and has it got? I assume it’s gotten more competitive now that you’re competing against anyone from anywhere in the world, as long as the US dollars and English speaking. Or would you say it’s gotten more competitive, less competitive, or about the same?

Ted Thomas  8:25  

It’s about the same because it requires a little skill. You know, the younger people well, the audience is changing. A lot of watch. The audience is usually 45 to 105 The reason it’s 45 to 105 in age is because they’re the people with money to the younger people. They don’t want to buy tax foreclosures or any of that. There’s a few exceptions. They want to BMW and some nice clothes. And, you know, meet some young, young people. But all all the people that are concerned about their future of what are our main clients. The main clients are that but it’s, it’s a struggle for them. You grew up with a computer. They didn’t grow up with a computer, so they not so hot about researching online. So we have to, we do classes every we have classes in this business every day. We have classes. 363, 300 days a year. We’re doing classes all the time, classes to teach people how to do it. So the people that are successful do it again and again and again and again. There’s probably, I’d say, 10 to 12, 15% of people at the most do it. The rest of them, you know, it’s some work. What would you say? Not a get rich quick.

Sharad Mehta  9:45  

Yeah, I don’t think anything is in real estate. I think info, you know, informations make it out to be or late night commercial. But I don’t think anything is. What would you say a typical investor, you know, makes rate of. 10 on tax lien certificates or tax deeds.

Ted Thomas  10:04  

There’s much more money in tax deeds because it’s not unusual. Let me give you some comparisons. So you could buy in Arkansas today, you could buy it three bedroom, one bath, you know, 30 years old. You could buy one of those for under 200,000 under 150,000 okay, but you’re going to buy Miami, you’re going to need 400 to 800,000 you’re going to buy in LA, you’re going to be 700,000 or any along the coast. You know where you are, anywhere along that coast, you know the average is 778, 100,000 so they’re going to need some money to do that, and they’ll need and they’ll have to pay at least to back taxes, and then there’s going to be bidding at the auction. Now, if they did it in in a in the average place, they can make, we teach if you can’t make 25 to 50,000 on each deal, don’t do the deal. We tell them to stop right now. But we can do all the analytics online. We can sit here, I can put a keyboard in front of you, and we can research every property in the United States. I’ve got systems to do that so that we we can not only find out where the auction is now, we can go to those properties and we can see the whole comparables around the neighborhood. Then we can figure out pricing on it. We can figure out everything except the after repair value. We’re not going to know exactly what the kitchen is going to cost, to the roof we’re going to cost, but you get the point, right.

Sharad Mehta  11:33  

So someone who started going, let’s say, you know, I, I’ve done fair bit of investing, but I do direct to seller, marketing, buy these properties, fix them and flip them. But let’s say, if I want to get into tax lien, right, what would you tell someone who’s totally newbie, has some investing experience, but no experience in tax lien? Where should I start? What markets should I totally avoid? And I should look, you know, between like, top three to five markets. Can you walk me through what that looks like.

Ted Thomas  12:01  

Sure, I wouldn’t walk you into the best markets, but the best real estate market is not necessarily best for us. Okay, so if you’re in in the middle part of the country, meaning not along where they can see the ocean,

Sharad Mehta  12:17  

just for context, I invest in Northwest Indiana. So just, you know, I

Ted Thomas  12:21  

understand Lake County. I know you invest. I understand that. You know, 50, 75,000, $100,000 house, okay, if you can buy those, you’re going to have, you’re going to have good margins, because we’re buying them at the tax auction. You’re going to buy them at a commissioner sale in that state, okay, you’re going to buy at the auction you’re probably going to spend, if the value is 50,000 you’re probably going to be able to get that property for 10 to 20 cents, maybe 30 cents, worst case, on the dollar, and then what you do with it is going to be up to you. Now, the way inflation is gone, the old $100,000 house now is worth 150 as you know. So those those markets are all good. The ones that are along the coast, they’re good. But it takes so much more money to get in. You’re going to have to spend like in New York right now, you’re going to need 100 to 150 to get into a house, even, even at the tax auction, you’re going to need that much because the housing prices are so high, so

Sharad Mehta  13:22  

for someone to buy a tax auction, most of these properties would not have any mortgage, right? Otherwise, the lender would just pay off the taxes. The lender would not want the property to go to tax sale. Is that correct?

Ted Thomas  13:35  

That’s correct. You’re correct. Actually, the Treasurer of the county has power, and the power the treasurer has, they have the power to auction the property, and when they auction the property, they delete the mortgage or deed of trust lien off the property. Because, let me finish, because we have what we call due process of law. Due process of law says anybody on title has to be notified, and a mortgage would be on title, or deed of trust would be on title, they are notified, notified, notified, with registered letters that they had to sign for Right, I’ve gone to the file, and you’ll see 17 letters, registered letters to the Bank of America, and they never, never respond or right, whatever bank otherwise

Sharad Mehta  14:29  

they walk, yeah, otherwise the lender could just pay off the taxes and then take it to the foreclosure auction.

Ted Thomas  14:36  

Right? Exactly, exactly. Okay, yeah, what’s

Sharad Mehta  14:39  

the, what’s the downside of investing in tax liens or tax deeds? Why should someone not do this?

Ted Thomas  14:47  

Well, first of all, if they shouldn’t do it, unless they understand sales and marketing. Because anybody can buy a property, anybody can fix one up, not efficiently like you do. Up, but they can fix them up, and if they get the wrong contractors, you know the rest of that story, so they’re going to lose their assets on a fix up. So there’s a big risk. I mean, a big risk, then the next big risk is, now they’ve got it. What are they going to do with it? So the average guy, and this is the disadvantage of buying online. They’re buying online. The neighborhood. My estimation, the neighborhood is just as important as the property. Whoever’s buying it from you is seeing that neighborhood before they see your property. So they’ve already made up their mind. They already know it all right? So the average newbie to the business it is going to come online say, Oh, this is such a great deal, but if they don’t go there, so my first rule that I teach, and I’ve taught for 30 years, is boots on the ground. Now, whether it’s my boots or yours, you be an experienced person. I say, Look, you know what to look for, but you have guys that know what to look for. Look for this. Look for this. What’s that roof going to cost? Can you get in if you can’t get in at them. What are we gonna have to do? The kitchen, whatever we’re gonna have to do a bathroom. All right, so if they can’t look at that property with boots on the ground, I tell them not to buy it. But you see, people think because the tax assessed value is 250,000 and they can get it for 40 that they stole it. Now you know better, because I haven’t given you enough information, and you haven’t had boots on the ground. If you had boots on the ground, you’d tell me right away whether you want it. If you didn’t have boots on the ground, you’re not interested. But when you have boots on the ground, you’re also looking at the neighborhood huge. You don’t look at the neighborhood. How are you going to sell it? So the two weaknesses are understanding after repair value and understanding what you’re going to do as far as selling. So when it comes to selling, we have to teach them everything from Craigslist to to, you know, Facebook marketplace, to using brokers, to doing it yourself, to putting up signs. I mean, I could go on for 20 minutes, you know, all the things you got to do to sell the product. And they don’t have a list. So you don’t have a list because they’re buying online somewhere else, the guy in the local area, he knows exactly who to go to. So a client, the best client for us, if we buy one, the best client is find out who all the rehabbers are and find out who all the fixer uppers are. Buy it low, sell it low to them, right? Let them fix it up, because they they know more about rehab than any of my clients are ever going to know in their lifetime. That’s

Sharad Mehta  17:34  

true. One question I have. I had looked at buying at the tax auction in India, and I think it was commissioner sale. There’s one more. I forgot which one, but I was going to buy. Going to buy it, the one where you immediately get possession to the property. But there’s one that comes before that. Also I forgot what’s it called?

Ted Thomas  17:50  

Yeah, it’s a regular tax default deduction, yeah, but

Sharad Mehta  17:53  

from what I remember, so let’s say, if it’s $100,000 property, and I paid 2030 cents on the dollar, let’s say I paid 20 30,000 so I do not get to get insurance on that property. Is that correct? So that no, you

Ted Thomas  18:09  

get no, you get in charge. You can insurance. Oh, you can insurance. Just, well, just, I’ll just give you one word, just go for commercial insurance. Go to a commercial broker and ask him, don’t go ask the regular one. They don’t know what the hell they’re doing. No, no, we can’t empty property. No, no, no, we don’t do that. Oh, no, no. They’re all afraid go to a commercial one. And so instead of paying, you know, $2,000 a year, you know, it might be 2500 Yeah, yeah. You know, it’s nothing. It’s it’s not a it’s it’s what you know, not what you’re guessing. You know

Sharad Mehta  18:46  

absolutely. Yeah, I think that’s what I’ve done. I’d gone to my insurance agent who was doing my residential properties, and I talked to her, and I said, Hey, I’m buying this property, the tax lien, I’m not gonna have deed to it. She said, Oh, we cannot insure it. So I’m like, Okay. And I checked with State Farm and couple of other companies. They said, No, we cannot insure cannot insure it. So I just, I’m like, I don’t want to take that risk of buying a property. And if the house were to burn down, then I don’t have anything to show for it. Okay,

Ted Thomas  19:09  

that’s, that’s we have people. We have people own five or seven properties at a time. I mean, the people that really do it, they go to an auction. Like, when I go to the auction, I don’t just go there to buy one property. I’m going to look at, I’m going to look at 100 properties, if the I’m interested in having, but I always look at at least 30, because there’s a lot of times people outbid me sometime the first day of the auction, these guys are, they’re just throwing money to get a property. You know, they want to win the auction, not the property. You know, they’ll good bill retail, you know. Well, when they’re out of the room and they run out, you know, then you and I can buy and online. You have to be careful, because people are pushing a button. Yeah, they don’t have if you don’t have boots on the ground. Now, when I say boots on the ground and you, I’m talking to experienced person, if the person has no experience, they can’t you. In my opinion, be in the business without getting someone that’s going that they can trust, that really will go get their shoes dirty, be out in the rain or the snow or whatever, and walk that property. Because when you walk a property, that’s a whole different ballgame, whether it’s a foundation, whether it’s the roof you’ve seen them, when the sheetrock in the whole place is falling down because the roof leaks or it’s got mold, I mean, a lot of these properties can be rehabilitated, not inexpensively, but they can be rehabilitated, and they’re perfect for the neighborhood, but or they get burned. There’s all there’s all kinds of there’s two and a half to 3 million tax defaulted properties a year. So they’re not all junk. Yeah, there’s a lot.

Sharad Mehta  20:44  

That’s a lot of properties. It’s almost as many properties that get sold every year. Well,

Ted Thomas  20:52  

there’s another part of the market which most of your people, if your people are rehabbers, they’ll be interested. There’s another part of the market that’s, that’s, that’s called leftovers, for lack of a better name. Now there’s all. It’s kind of in in Texas, they call them a strike off list, okay? And if you go to, they go to the Carolinas, they’re going to call them forfeited lands list. These are properties that come up for auction. Once doesn’t sell, two doesn’t sell, three doesn’t sell. Finally, the Treasurer is looking bad, and the treasurer’s got a report to the Board of Supervisors what they get rid of. Because you see, the property isn’t generating if there’s no money coming in, the Board of Supervisors saying, wait a minute, we want to spend this money for the schools and the fire department. You can’t sell it. So what the treasurer does? They take it off the regular list and they put it on this leftover. Just think of it as leftovers. There’s a lot of different names. I won’t go through them all, but you get my point right. There’s some counties will have 2000 of those. Wow. Same thing with with land. So I have a gal last week in in Volusia County, which is Daytona Beach, the land was not billable because there wasn’t enough. But sure enough, the one went to tax auction right next door. She just combined them. Now she could build in a nice neighborhood. She was she never done a deal. She just walked her through it. After she ran through the class, there was no risk, because there was land they already had all the utilities were in. Everything was there. What are you gonna do? Burn the grass. That’s all I could do, right? So, so she didn’t have to worry about all the things that everybody else worried about. She bought it. She made herself 100% profit in like, a month. Wow, it’s, it’s what this is a business of what you know, not what you do, right? It’s what you and so you just have to learn it. And I say, just have to learn it. I mean, it’s, it’s more extensive than just buying a foreclosure or going to, you know, foreclosure auction or something like that. It’s more than that. You got to, I mean, these are used and abused properties, right?

Sharad Mehta  22:57  

So let’s say, if I’m I just want to be a passive investor, right? I just want to buy these tax lien certificates and hope that either they get redeemed, I make my interest or I get an investor to buy it from me. What are the best states to do that where I can make a double digit or higher return if I wanted to do that?

Ted Thomas  23:21  

Well, do just do just that? Tax liens are probably the safest investment in America today, probably the safest. You can’t give money to anybody else. Your money goes from your hand right to the county, okay, and then the county gives you, I’ll show you a certificate like this. You don’t get a property. You can’t go on the property. You can’t demand rents, you can’t do anything. The owner stays on the property. They stay there. Now if, after a couple of years, they don’t pay you, then you’re going to get the property. But 95 97% pay. So now just find auctions where there’s a lot of tax lien certificates, and just start learning one or two communities there. You don’t have to learn them all. So take Florida, for example. Florida will have 1 million tax certificates available between from the first of May to the end of June every year, 1 million.

Sharad Mehta  24:20  

Wow, that’s a huge number. And then you can get potentially up to 20% you said, right?

Ted Thomas  24:27  

Florida, in Florida, you can get up to 18% 18% right? But remember, a tax lien can be bid down. So I bid 18, but you want that one, so you bid 17, next bid is 16, next bid is 50. So people bid them down. So most of those are going out the door now right in the 10, 10% range.

Sharad Mehta  24:51  

That’s still pretty good, I said. And I would imagine some people can do that in their IRA also, is that correct?

Ted Thomas  24:58  

Oh, yeah, we teach them. Do everything they can, an IRA or a pension plan, everything that’s incredible. And the counties love that. They the county’s all prepared for that. Yeah, I’ve been doing the same thing for 30 years. I mean, we taught the county how to do the IRAs. That’s

Sharad Mehta  25:16  

amazing. Yeah. What do you think there’s some misconceptions people have about tax liens or tax deed investing.

Ted Thomas  25:26  

Well, no, it’s massive. I mean, they people don’t have any idea. They’ve got a lot of dreams about what the business is. It’s very basic. It’s it’s by the book. The auctioneers are all going to run it by the book. Most communities, normal community like, you know, across the state of Kansas or Illinois or Indiana, place the treasurer or someone that works in the treasury office will do the auction. But there are places like Miami, Houston, you know, those kind of places, even Los Angeles, now they have professional auctioneers, and it’s massive like if you went to Los Angeles, you would have to pay $5,000 deposit to go to the auction, which they’ll give back to you if you don’t bid, and you get a bidder’s number, but you would be in the room with round numbers, 2000 people. Let me show you a list. Maybe I can, Linda, you still in the room, Linda, can you come back and give me a Los Angeles list? Back there, I’ll show you a list from Los Angeles. Thank you.

Sharad Mehta  26:31  

Wow. Wow. That is crazy.

Ted Thomas  26:39  

This property’s in here, 18 million, 20 million, wow, yeah. Starting bid.

Sharad Mehta  26:47  

Starting bid.

Ted Thomas  26:50  

Oh So see, California, the the most liberal state and the property people don’t pay the tax California said, Oh, naughty. You did pay your debt. They don’t do anything. They don’t do anything for five years. Five years, five years. By the time the Treasury get to it, it might be seven.

Sharad Mehta  27:15  

Wow. And what’s the, what’s the most aggressive state? So California is the most liberal. What would be the which state would be the one that you don’t pay? Indiana, it’s like 18 months. Yeah,

Ted Thomas  27:28  

it’s Texas. Texas, yeah, in a foreclosure business in Texas is 21 days. In the tax defaulter business, they sell a redeemable deed, redeemable deed in Texas, if I raise my hand and I buy it, I pay the other guy’s taxes, so they give me the deed to his property. But that guy or gal that they have 180 days to come forward and say, I want property back. If they come forward and want their property back, they have to give you all what you paid, whatever you bid, plus 25% penalty. 25%

Sharad Mehta  28:11  

Wow, that is, that’s a lot of money. That’s a lot of and it happens once a year. No,

Ted Thomas  28:18  

it happens once a month, once a month, first Tuesday of every month, 250 counties, wow.

Sharad Mehta  28:25  

And they have only six months to redeem. Otherwise you get the property. If they redeem, they pay you 25%

Ted Thomas  28:33  

and so there’s six different redeemable states. It’s the best deal in the world. George is the same way. They only got 108 no 168 counties in Georgia. And in Georgia, they have 365 days, and it’s a 20% penalty in the first year, a 30% in the second year, and a 40% in the third year and a 50% in the fourth year.

Sharad Mehta  28:58  

Wow, had his I had no idea about that. Absolutely. Yeah,

Ted Thomas  29:04  

no, it’s, it’s, it’s a level that people are. I mean, people call me up and say, Well, I got a redeemable deed in California. I said, you do. How’d you get that? Well, I got it from the sheriff. I said, the sheriff doesn’t sell those things. What are you talking about? And they say, Well, of course, I got it from the sheriff. I said, What do you mean? The sheriff doesn’t, doesn’t sell those you had to go to the tax defaulted auction. The Treasurer controls property, not the sheriff. Oh, well, then I got it from the they don’t. They don’t. People don’t know. They don’t. They’re they’re guessing and trying to, you know, show you how smart they are. They don’t know this. Is a this is a business. It’s by the book, every bit of it. And the guy that’s a rehabber over a period of time, once he learns it. Every class I do, I do, we do classes all the time. We never stop doing classes. But every 90 days, we do an event where the people can come to the event and. Yeah, and when they come to the event, about 10, maybe 15% of every event will be rehabbers or wholesalers, because they’re getting their brains beat out at the foreclosure auctions. And, you know, you can’t get so they want to start getting these properties. But the real market is people that are 45 to 105 you come in my become in my seminar room, it’s all, it’s all gray hair like this.

Sharad Mehta  30:25  

You’re doing, you’re doing great time. Yeah. So all like, speaking of that, can you share a memorable success story from one of your clients, using your using your system,

Ted Thomas  30:38  

any week of the year. Give you a real fancy one. You want a little one. You want a

Sharad Mehta  30:42  

big one, whatever, whatever, whatever, like sticks out to you. You know one of your clients that you hold

Ted Thomas  30:48  

last month, we had six last month. Okay, people in foreign countries like Canada and Mexico, they’re speaking English, and they can get American dollars. So they want to buy in the States, because it’s the only place you can do this. So I teach people, so I’ve got a guy in Regina, Saskatchewan, that’s spelled with an R, Regina, that’s the capital of the province Regina, is north of Montana. It’s a province that’s bigger than Texas, and they were real estate market there, and he became a client because the market caved in and didn’t come back. So he wanted to sell off and buy tax products. So I told him to buy tax defaulted property. So the the first one he bought, he bought a residential lot. I teach people buy a residential lot because the infrastructure’s in and if you’re buying from a foreign country, you got, there’s nothing that’s going to get burned down. Immigrants aren’t going to get in the house and ruin it. You’re not going to have a dope thing and all that. So he bought that. I teach him to buy it low at the auction and then sell it. So the property was in Riverside, California. It was valued a residential lot, 229,000 he got it for round numbers, $30,000 about 10 cents a month ago on adult Okay, residential lots will make good prices, because everybody that you and I know, they were born in a house. Let’s say they were conceived in a house, then they’re born in a house, and then they live in a house. So what do they want? They want a house at the auction where it says, great deals on residential lots and everything. Infrastructure is all in but nobody even looks at them. So I have people in Los Angeles, I can show you case history after case history of people buying in Los Angeles, California, for less than 10 cents on the dollar, residential lot.

Sharad Mehta  32:56  

How is that possible? It’s so freaking expensive to buy anything, and I don’t live too far from Los Angeles. And how much money did he make? So he bought for 29 or 30,000 non numbers,

Ted Thomas  33:08  

he sold it, made himself 20,000 bucks. Wow, but he he’s sitting in his basement office. Okay, right. So the next week, the next week, he went to an auction in across Puget Sound from Seattle, cross Puget Sound, okay, and five acres had a barn. It had a mobile home built on it was all cleared off, all woods around there, solid, high, high pine trees and stuff like that. And he bought it, and he made $150,000 and he sold the property in four days.

Sharad Mehta  33:46  

He made 150,000 I

Ted Thomas  33:50  

can show you a video of him saying it. Show you the picture.

Sharad Mehta  33:52  

Wow. No, no, I believe you. It’s just that’s incredible. That’s incredible.

Ted Thomas  33:57  

The next one he bought, he went back to Riverside County and he went to Palm Springs, right and house, according to the broker, the house is worth 850 he paid 199 for the house. And

Sharad Mehta  34:12  

how much should he make on that?

Ted Thomas  34:15  

Well, we teach him, we don’t hold properties. We teach him, buy it low sell it lows. He made 100,000 we left all the money. House anyway, it was a it was like a 6000 square foot house he didn’t want. And

Sharad Mehta  34:28  

how long did it take him to make 100,000

Ted Thomas  34:33  

months? Wow, that’s incredible. The whole business is that way? No, it would the same thing would happen to you if you’re in Arkansas or whether you’re in Indiana, and I have people that, people that go to Tulsa and do 10 properties at every every time they have the auction, or they’ll go to Oklahoma City and do 10, because you go to, you go to auction in Tulsa, there’ll be 500 properties today this market. We had people at this market, this. Auction, there was at least 500 properties.

Sharad Mehta  35:03  

Yeah, no, I got, I gotta look into your course. I mean, it sounds really fascinating. Yeah, thank you, Ted for sharing all of this. A couple of last question for you. You’re okay, obviously amazing, seasoned investors. You’ve helped 1000s of other investors gain financial freedom. What do you do for fun,

Ted Thomas  35:23  

work, work. Actually, I made a lot of money when I was young, and my wife could speak five languages, European languages, and so we traveled the world for a long period of time. And so now I just like working. I mean, I’ve been everywhere I want to go. Only place I missed was China. I never got to go to China. But other than that, you know, I mean, I’ve conducted classes on this subject, of people that know this. They’ll tell me, if I put a 50 or 100 people together, where you come teach a class, fly all the way to Singapore, Singapore, from here, that’s 22 hours, right? Gotta go to LA, and then LA, I gotta get down to Japan, get out of Tokyo, and then Tokyo, back up to Singapore. And, oh, my God. You know, it takes a week, you know, by the time you go over and back and teach a three day class. Anyway, so I do it. I do it all over. Let me tell you something I can help your people with every other Saturday, I do a six hour workshop seminar. I’m not an internet marketer. I am not an internet marketer. So I charge $47 for it. Your people will charge them 23 bucks, and all they have to do is your last name, Mehta, yes, M, E, H, T, A, yes, put 50 behind it. Meta, 50 as the code, so that we know that you put them on there. But your people want to go to that cost them 23 bucks. If they go to that class and they don’t like it for any reason, they just say, I didn’t like it. I want my money back. I will tell you you’ll learn more. If you learn something today, you will learn 500% more on that class. It starts on the east coast at 11 o’clock in the morning. So in California, that’s eight o’clock. It goes all day. It never stops. Can have lunch. You can eat it’s a virtual seminar that they can sit in their living room. They can invite their friends over, and they can all watch that. They will be amazed that class will have anywhere from 100 to 200 people on it every other Saturday,

Sharad Mehta  37:41  

Hi, I’m gonna take care. I’m gonna have my team member attended. He’s placed in I think he can, yeah, definitely. So send me a link to that. I’ll have my team reach out to you and have you send link to me, and also we’ll send it out to all our people on our email list to see at least I know. I’ll have my my team member take care of that, attend that, and I’ll send

Ted Thomas  38:03  

you a couple of really sexy testimonials, if you want to use them perfect. My assistant was in the rum Ehsan rishat. She’s still here. Yeah? Her name is Linda. I

Sharad Mehta  38:14  

have her email. Linda, yeah, I have her email. I’ll send her in, you know, after she has

Ted Thomas  38:17  

a whole thing of all kinds of questions you can ask and stuff like that, but the six hours is big time. Stuff,

Sharad Mehta  38:23  

perfect. Okay, no, I do that. Ted. What’s the one book that’s had most influence on your life

Ted Thomas  38:32  

that’s easy selling, sales and marketing, by Perry Marshall. It’s really a book on 8020 okay? Everybody should have it 8020 if you understand 8020 you’ll get rich in this business. Perfect

Sharad Mehta  38:47  

final question. If you could spend a day with anyone, dead or alive, who would you want to spend the day with, and why?

Ted Thomas  38:57  

Well, if it’s alive, I would like to just follow Elon Musk around for a day. I mean, I just, I’m just so astonished. And a guy’s got, I mean, he’s got some chutzpah. She just says it like he is and whatever. But, you know, he’s, we need a few guys like him being the president so they could free up the world for the rest of us. But you know, we’re, we’re under this cloud that we don’t need to be under, you know, to give people freedom, they do well, by the way, is your accent? Is it Indian or Pakistan? Indian? Indian? Okay, so he, he frees up the world. And I like that. You know, that’s great. I don’t like undocumented people coming across the border. So Don’t, don’t, don’t misinterpret me. I mean, if you got to, if you got rules, let’s follow the rules. But I love guys like him, so he’s special,

Sharad Mehta  39:49  

perfect. Thank you. That incredible interview. If someone wants to find out more, what’s the best way for them to get more information about about you and connect with you?

Ted Thomas  39:58  

Well. Well, every reference we do sends them to that six hour event. Okay, we send everything that because we can answer every we can answer hundreds of questions in that six hours. It’s not a waste of time. Take my word for it, perfect.

Sharad Mehta  40:13  

Okay, yeah, so I’ll email Lynda, get the link to that and sign up and send it to our email list. Okay,

Ted Thomas  40:19  

okay, just remember Ted thomas.com

Sharad Mehta  40:22  

Perfect. Thank you, Dad, thank you so much. Thanks. Okay,

Ted Thomas  40:26  

good luck.

Sharad Mehta  40:27  

Thanks.