Mastering Short Sales with Real Estate Maven Bob Vieira

Speaker 1: 0:02

In this episode of the Aim High podcast, I speak with Bob Vieira. He's the founder and owner of Universal Short Sales. He's also a full-time real estate investor and he shares his insights on navigating the complexities of short sales. This episode covers how short sales offer a lifeline for homeowners the eye and on payments and underwater on their mortgages, allowing them to avoid foreclosure. We'll also discuss his journey from real estate agent to short sale expert and investor will emphasize the chaotic yet rewarding nature of short sales. The key takeaways for today include the importance of persistence, flexibility and leveraging a niche expertise for success. The episode provides valuable advice for new investors, highlighting the power of consistency and the necessity of embracing inconvenience in the real estate industry, where we provide real estate investors with the tools to achieve generational wealth. This is the Aim High podcast episode 72. Hello and welcome to the Aim High podcast. Today I'm joined by Bob Vieira. Hi Bob, how are you today Doing? Great Bob, how are you? How are you? I'm doing great man. Listen, can you do me a favor and give me a quick introduction?

Speaker 2: 1:05

Yeah, my name is Bob Vieira. I am the founder and the owner of a short sale processing company called Universal Short Sales and I'm also a full-time real estate investor building a buy and hold portfolio. We do fix and flips, et cetera. Great.

Speaker 1: 1:22

And man, we were talking about this offline, but my first foray into short sales failed miserably, because the person I was trying to help out of a jam decided to open up a credit card and the next thing you knew, the bank went. Yeah, I remember that thing. We were doing for you. We're pulling that. So can you do me a favor first and explain to me exactly what is a short sale and how does somebody get into that situation?

Speaker 2: 1:44

Yeah, A short sale in real estate in its simplest form is when there's two things happening. So, first off, the seller wants to sell their property, but number one they're falling behind on their mortgage payments to the bank. It could be one payment behind to 100 payments behind anything in the middle. And then the second thing that's happening is their underwater on their mortgage. So the mortgage balance that they owe the bank exceeds what the property is worth, as is. So you have mortgage illiquity and they're underwater on their mortgage. The bank lets themselves short of what they owe on the balance and it does not get recorded as a foreclosure on their record. They're able to get out from under the situation and they don't have to show up the closing bud to cut a check for the different. Okay.

Speaker 1: 2:38

That's great. So it's helping people out, getting them out of a sticky situation right.

Speaker 2: 2:43

That's exactly what it is. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 2:47

How did you, how did you wind up getting into a short sales?

Speaker 2: 2:51

So I was a real estate agent in Philadelphia right out of college. Graduated from college, I jumped right into real estate full time, feet to the fire, just like any new agent. I was running around like a chicken, with my head cut off, just trying to get listings, put food on the table, make some money, and before you knew it, I was just stumbling upon the short sale list. At the time I didn't know what the hell a short sale was, let alone how to do one, but through trial and error, I just started getting real good at them and people were sending me these leads and yeah, fast forward to 2019. That's when I launched my company. Now just to do it on a national scale, cool.

Speaker 1: 3:36

I'm going to ask you did? You was your first short sale, Probably as an agent, right, but yeah, how did you pick up in investing in short sales?

Speaker 2: 3:49

My first short sale was actually a complete disaster, if I'm being honest. But that's a big reason I jumped into it, because I'm like, holy shit, they're this crazy and chaotic for everybody involved, then there has to be a need for this. But anyway, what I realized was, after processing these short sales and getting good at them, I realized people were buying these at pretty large discounts. You can't get everyone for a discount, but there's really good opportunities. If you process the short sale correctly, you could buy deals for pennies on the dollar. So when I realized that, that's when I got involved and now I buy short sales as well as process.

Speaker 1: 4:29

Cool, and now, as an investor, what was your first short sale? Let's run through some numbers so somebody can get an idea of exactly what this is.

Speaker 2: 4:40

Short sale as an investor, I'm trying to think so okay, it was a Philadelphia deal. I don't remember the exact address because, keep in mind, it all gets jumbled because I started off just processing them but I'm pretty sure the first one I bought and then resold it was in Philadelphia and the profit, if I'm not mistaken, was around. It was in the low 40s, net profit I think I mean 42, 43 grand, and that was without even doing any work to the property. So do you want me to go through like the deal itself, or? Yeah, man, If you can, that would be great. Yeah, yeah, yeah for sure. It was a two-story row house. I can't remember the neighborhood. It was in Philly. Property needed a ton of work. It was a vacant property. It was barely even livable. Now, those are the absolute best for anybody watching us. Those are the absolute best short sale deals to get a massive discount, Because in a short sale the main. So there's 12 steps to the short sale process which my company has broken down. One of those steps this is the third party appraiser. That's when the lender comes in and they appraise the property and then whatever that appraisal number comes back at, that's what they're going to accept. That's the most important part. So on this deal, because the property was in such bad condition, we were able to essentially put in a really low offer and then back it up with supporting documents to the appraiser that the bank hired, and then he agreed with our price. So we got a really low appraisal. We purchased the property and because we bought it so low, we didn't even have to do any work and we resold it to another investor Great.

Speaker 1: 6:39

Is that what universal short sales does now, or what exactly are you doing?

Speaker 2: 6:44

We have a hybrid model. So the first model is if we're not the investors let's say, for example but if you brought me a deal and said hey, Bob, we have a short sale here, I want to purchase it, we need you guys to process it. In that case we have a fee based processing system where we're the third party processors. We do everything, start to finish, and then we get a $10,000 fee on the HUD from the end buyer only if it closes. That's our model number one. Model number two is we do everything I just said. We do the entire short sale, start to finish, except we'll actually buy the property as the buyer.

Speaker 1: 7:28

Okay, you're buying and holding primarily, or are you flipping a combination of both?

Speaker 2: 7:32

Because our short sales are pretty much all over the country. Buying and flipping Usually we'll do, but depends how much work the property needs. But we'll do some work and then we'll resell it, okay.

Speaker 1: 7:46

What was the worst case scenario that you've ever been involved in when it came to the short sale?

Speaker 2: 7:52

They're so chaotic. That's a tough one, okay, do you want deals that ended up falling apart, or like ones that we ended up getting to the finish line?

Speaker 1: 8:01

No, here's what I'm looking for. Yeah, we have a property, and I'll just tell you that the property's name is Voldemort, because it's that which shall not be named. That's what I'm looking for. What is the one that you look back on and you go oh my God, I can't believe I was in that situation.

Speaker 2: 8:17

Yeah, I would have to say one we did recently in Jacksonville, florida. So there was a tenant If that's what you want to call her, she was a tenant and then she didn't leave, so I guess let's call her a squatter. So the short sale was so nuts. So we have the primary mortgage that we had to do the short sale on for the homeowners and then we pull title and we realize there's not only a primary, there's a second mortgage position plus an IRS lien against the property of federal IRS. So at this point I'm just sitting there, I'm talking to my processor. I'm like we almost pull out the omic. We have multiple mortgages, which is that's okay, we deal with that. But now we have a squatters, a hostile squatter situation and an IRS lien against the property. Do we drop this? But we talked about it and the homeowners were really nice people and we just really wanted help. Let's just figure this thing out. So this almost this deal almost took us a full year, which is insane. A full year start to finish. Getting the first mortgage approved for the short sale was easy. The second one was like pulling teeth, but we got that done and then we were able to get the IRS to do what's called a lien discharge. So remember, this is taking almost a year. This is so chaotic. Irs wasn't going to work with us, but then they agreed to discharge the lien temporarily, just so the sale could go through, and then they were going to put the lien back on another one of the seller's asset. Okay, so there were so many moving parts. We get everything done. We're about to close. Now we have to deal with the squatter situation. So, just to keep it as short as I could, it was okay. We had to pay for movers for her, the squatter. We had to send people to the house. The unlisting agent the poor listing agent and her husband had to go to the house negotiate the squatter. We had to get a towing company to come and move the squatter's car that they demanded. They wanted to bring a car with them to their new location that they couldn't drive. I don't know why. I don't know. It was extremely chaotic and we ended up getting it done. So that's the story in a nutshell, but it was why.

Speaker 1: 10:42

That's awesome. That's perfect. Here's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for some value that we can bring to a newer investor who's going. Okay, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. I know we deal with this. That's very creative Getting a moving company involved in the deal, getting the tow company involved to pull their car out of the way. There are so many different ways to attack this thing. It just goes to show you that nobody's an island, it's a team sport. Real estate.

Speaker 2: 11:11

One thousand percent, just for the people that are newer in the business. Listening, like you said, that's an example of chaotic deals like that. I feel like there's so much information on the internet these days and people try to make business and real estate seem like it's so straightforward and so easy. That's the kind of shit you're actually going to have to deal with on a regular basis. That's the biggest advice right there.

Speaker 1: 11:36

Yeah, man being military, we used to say flexibility is the key to air power. Now I just say, yeah, flexibility is the key to true power, because if you can't think on your feet and pivot quickly, you're going to bankrupt and go upside down real quickly.

Speaker 2: 11:53

I love that being flexible. I never looked at it that way, but that's a perfect way to say it.

Speaker 1: 11:58

You've got to move from one possibility to another possibility. You've got to get the drop of a hat, so to speak.

Speaker 2: 12:05

Yeah so.

Speaker 1: 12:07

Kuda was on that. That was some pretty good stuff, so let's go into what you're doing now and why you're actually on the show.

Speaker 2: 12:54

Yeah, so, like I said, I'm a full-time investor, but our main focus and why I'm on the show is our short sale company that I mentioned. So the biggest value add we do, and how we get most of our deals at this point, is by partnering with other wholesalers and other investors. So a short sale, as I just explained before someone who's underwater on their payments, they have negative equity and they're behind on their mortgage payments to the bank that's a dead lead in most situations. So, as wholesalers and investors are marketing, when they come across these deals, a lot of times they end up just throwing them away. But you can't really sub to them. Sometimes if it doesn't make sense, you have to purchase yourself. You can't wholesale a short sale. You're not allowed to assign a short sale agreement. Yeah, we help people take these dead leads. They send them over to us, we JV on them, we do all the work, start to finish and then, whatever our net profit is, we cut a check for 20% for every dead lead that you send. So excellent.

Speaker 1: 14:08

So it's a simplistic way for someone who's already doing lead generation to find a way to basically make something out of nothing, right?

Speaker 2: 14:17

1000% and minimum I'd say it ends up shaking out to be like 1400 bucks net to our JV partner, which is amazing on a lead that you're losing money on. But we just cut one for just under 5000. Here in the year we cut one, we sent a wire for almost 15 grand. It was like 14,000 in sum for a dead lead.

Speaker 1: 14:42

Right.

Speaker 2: 14:43

Better than a referral fee Better than a referral fee, and it really it comes down to. It's a secondary source of income for your investing business. So if your wholesaling house is flipping and then you get these dead short sale leads to, come in, send them to us, work them, and then we just start sending you wires. It's a secondary income source Easy.

Speaker 1: 15:04

Too easy, yeah, yeah, all right Now. So you've got this going on. You got universals up and running. You're taking on clients and making things happen for them. Where does it go from here? What's on your horizon?

Speaker 2: 15:19

So I want to grow the short sale business. My goal is to help more and more realtors and real estate investors cash in on these dead leads and just be a tool in their tool belt. And then I just started to grow my own rental portfolio as well in my local Pennsylvania market. So that's it. Just really grow Right across the bridge. What's that?

Speaker 1: 15:42

We're right across the bridge. Yeah, yeah, okay, cool yeah. So I'll be looking forward to seeing what you're doing.

Speaker 2: 15:53

Yeah, yeah, I'm in. So I'm from the Scranton area, I'm not from Philly. We were living in Shlater. I'm right outside of Scranton.

Speaker 1: 16:00

Okay, you're a little bit away, a little further, yeah, yeah, awesome. All right. So I got to ask you before we go into the story, for the one thing that I ask everyone, I'm going to ask you now, is what is one thing, a takeaway that you can provide as your wealth increased? What's one thing you learned?

Speaker 2: 16:19

Stay consistent and don't be afraid of inconvenience. So I feel like where a lot of people that tripped up is. They look at social media and there's a glorification of entrepreneurship, but that's all BS. I'm sure you would agree with me. It's a grind. You have to be consistent and don't shy away from inconvenience Every day. Getting your tasks done that are going to move the needle is extremely inconvenient and you just have to deal with it and keep moving forward.

Speaker 1: 16:51

Yeah, dude, I write everything down. I got this little book. I keep it with me, no matter what I'm doing, if your engine is half empty or it's completely full, you just got to keep chugging along.

Speaker 2: 17:03

I love that. It's so true. You wake up some days and you just don't feel like doing anything. Those are the days when, if you push through those days, you're going to be great yeah.

Speaker 1: 17:13

Man I got to tell you I'm going to ask you in a couple of minutes a few mindset questions. That's the soaring four. But there's one thing that I say all the time and I'm sure you'll agree with it is I can motivate you that was a hockey coach. So I can motivate you. But when it comes down to it, after you hit the first time on your first shift, it stops being motivation and it starts being disciplined. That has to take over, otherwise you're done.

Speaker 2: 17:39

Totally agree Motivation is overrated.

Speaker 1: 17:42

Exactly, I listened to it. Take great Good job. You got two minutes of motivation that'll get you going.

Speaker 2: 17:47

It's a work.

Speaker 1: 17:47

Yeah, you can only listen to so much, david Goggins.

Speaker 2: 17:51

Yeah yeah, I used to get chipped up on that too, like when I first started. I would just I'd be hooked on the motivation stuff, like the clips and stuff on YouTube.

Speaker 1: 18:00

But, like you said, I didn't realize it was just short lived, right All right, let's go into the story, for these are the same four questions that I ask everyone who is. Yeah, these are the same four questions that I ask every guest that could help someone who's just starting out achieve new heights. Question number one is what they use to keep yourself motivated.

Speaker 2: 18:24

I like to read, so I like to read every morning. That's a very important part of my morning ritual. Just a lot of its motivation, but a lot of it is just keeping me focused to start the day.

Speaker 1: 18:37

I would say, putting the right things in my brain reading yeah, somebody just asked me to join a 75 hard and I was like, look, I'm already doing everything in 75 hard, except I like to have a bourbon every once in a while. So I'm not doing it, sorry.

Speaker 2: 18:51

I'm not even kidding. My wife and I were talking about doing it too, and we're the same thing. We have the workouts in and all that stuff. But yeah, we like to enjoy ourselves too. That's the part where we get a little tripped up on Right. Yeah, it does it like you can tell it works.

Speaker 1: 19:07

Yeah, good on them. Look, here's the thing. It's just. It would be like, okay, every five to seven days I start over. Yeah, okay, great, all right. What is one thing that you learned that completely changed your mindset?

Speaker 2: 19:22

Great question Completely changed, oh, masterminds. So joining masterminds was I just did, I think. Two years ago I joined my first one. That totally changed my mindset. I'm like, wow, there's people out here that I could align myself with, that actually want to see me do good and then I could collaborate with.

Speaker 1: 19:41

So definitely masterminds. Yeah, I threw in the plug. Which one did you join?

Speaker 2: 19:47

The first one I ever joined was elite level mastermind. It's run by Adrian Smoode and Dave Garcia. It's a smaller, intimate group. It's really good yeah.

Speaker 1: 20:00

I had Adrian on the podcast a little while ago. In fact that was book on the shelf, Did you really?

Speaker 2: 20:06

Yeah, that's so awesome. Yeah, he's a good friend, great guy.

Speaker 1: 20:09

Yeah, yeah, I agree, he's a good dude. What are some tools that you use to keep you on track?

Speaker 2: 20:19

Definitely my CRM. And where is it? You're going to laugh, just give me one sec. I am an old soul at heart. This is what keeps me on track of day, an old school planner. I don't use Google Calendar or any of that stuff, so my CRM and my old school planner that I write in.

Speaker 1: 20:41

I'll be honest man writing stuff down, and I look I do have a Google Calendar. If it's not on the calendar it doesn't exist in my mind, but if it's not in here it doesn't get done. I've tried Asana, I've tried all these different, I've zapped things to get into motion or whatever, all these different things, and it just basically boils down to write it in here and it'll happen.

Speaker 2: 21:03

So then is that what you do too. So you write your whole schedule down by hand every day.

Speaker 1: 21:08

More of more along the lines of I set up a quarterly, then monthly, then weekly goal and then I'll have no more than three bullet points for the week and then each day will be three bullet points. That gets me towards that three bullet points at the end. The schedule is in here, but if it's not for it like I'm so hooked in, you know what I mean it goes to the phone, it goes to the watch, all that different stuff. But yeah, the actual tasks that I do throughout the day are the things that are in the book. Interesting. Yeah, so I'm right along with you. I used to use a planner all the time until I started building a team, and now we're all on the. That's the reason it's in Google calendars, because we all need to be able to see it. That makes sense. And then if you had to start all over, what's one thing you change?

Speaker 2: 22:01

I would pick a niche earlier, before I got into the niche of short sales and started getting noticed noticed being really good at one thing. I was just a generalist. I was running around doing some wholesale deals, selling some real estate for my license. Let me be flipping a product. I was too much of a generalist, which I think is good. You want to branch out, but I think in the beginning I would have just focused on one thing sooner and then branched off from there.

Speaker 1: 22:32

Yeah, good point. The more laser focused you are, the more successful you'll be right. Yeah, definitely. Awesome, man, bob. If somebody wanted to reach out to you and find out more about Universal, how would they do that?

Speaker 2: 22:46

Go to my website universalshortsalescom it's just a company namecom or find me on Facebook Bobby Vieira, shooting at PM. And let's talk, let's network, let's connect. That's how we met.

Speaker 1: 23:00

Yep, exactly, Exactly. Hey, always be networking right. Because you're talking about the masterminds and look, mentorships, masterminds, networking groups, all these different things really help you push faster, farther and harder.

Speaker 2: 23:19

That's everything. I would even say one more, but I totally agree. That is actually a requirement, I feel like and I didn't realize that until recently either Coaching, mentoring, mastermining, that stuff is a requirement, I think.

Speaker 1: 23:32

Yeah, I would fully agree. I appreciate you coming on. Thank you very much for providing a lot of value today. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. It's an absolute pleasure.