RG 086 – Getting Deals Done in the New Economy with Jay Connor
About Jay
- Jay has been working in real estate for 14 years
- He only works with private lenders
- Jay has rehabbed over 350 houses
Nuts and Bolts
Jay Conner is an investor of 14 years who has completed over $52 million dollars of transactions and manages to only work 10 hours a week! He has automated the majority of his processes and outsources many others. He once raises $2 million in less than 90 days and all of this was private money after he was cut out of bank loans. Jay has written a book called “Getting deals done in the new economy”. Jay was brought up in the family mobile home business which he inherited from his father and worked on until the retail financing was cut off on the mobile home business. He had to liquidate the business and so started single family property investment. He bought his first property for $50,000 with an unsecured line of debt from the bank and rehabbed a property for a further $50,000 and when he flipped it he made $40,000 straight into his pocket. In the 14 years since he liquidated his father’s business he has rehabbed over 350 houses.
Jay had a mindset change with work and moved away from his past thought that you had to get a single job and stay there till you died. He migrated to a mindset looking for the next opportunity and changing careers. As an entrepreneur he says he doesn’t have to find new jobs and change careers because he can follow his interests and do a bit of everything on his own path. This mindset helped him realise that he’s 100% responsible for everything that happens in his life and he encourages other people to start educating themselves on their financial future and get free from their job. Find a mentor, try everything and do it yourself. Jay is really strict about always finding a mentor when doing something new, even when moving from single family to commercial real estate.
While doing deals about 8 years ago Jay called his bank because he had 2 single family houses under contract ready to close within 30 days. His banker informed him that the bank would not be loaning him anymore money and had collapsed his line of credit. Within two weeks Jay had been introduced to the idea of private money and the world of self-directed IRA’s and in less than 90 days he had raised $2.5million in new funding. Jay claims that the banker who collapsed his credit actually did him a favour because without him he’d never had come across this way of raising money. He found out about private money by initially calling a friend for help who recommended a man called Ron LeGrand who runs conferences about private money. Jay went to a conference, learnt everything he could and then created a 5 step system for getting funding from a private funder.
There are two categories for private money; your own network of friends and family and unknown existing private lenders. When approaching existing lenders he originally hired a paralegal to go through public records in his county looking for names on mortgages that had loan money out on separate property to the one they lived in. He hten wrote a series of 3 letters to these people; not openly soliciting but developing a relationship. However more recently he has automated this process and finds them through software that identifies investors in a zip code. Within a personal network Jay recommends following these 5 steps; identify them and have a casual conversation (Jay has scripts for this), he offers an audio guide on Stress Free Investing, then follows up with a 1-2-1 which details more of the financial details and then finally he asks for a verbal pledge.
Top tips
- Most important habit – Affirmations and writing goals each evening
- Most influential person – Ron LeGrand
- Most important tool – His lead virtual assistant
- Most important failure – Buying beach condos and flipping them after the market had turned
- Contact – jayconner.com
