RG 181 – From Columbia, to Wholesaling Real Estate, to Taking Over the World with Rodrigo Afanador
Nuts and bolts
Rodrigo is the owner of Asheville Cash Buyers Club which is a wholesaling company. He is also the host of the Asheville Real Estate News podcast. Rodrigo is originally from Colombia and he moved to the US 10 years ago, he’s now 29 years old. He made his first dollar teaching English to other kids from nearby schools in Colombia. His dad was flipping cars on the side of his normal business and was a true entrepreneur and advised Rodrigo to ‘go and find the yes’. He grew up in Bogota which is a city of 8 million people, he went to an English speaking school in Colombia and his mother is from the US. Rodrigo moved to Asheville to go to university but after 18 months he was kicked out of education but chose to stay in the area. He lived in Canada before he moved to the US but after one winter he said never again!
Wholesale is a great way to get into real estate because there’s no barrier to getting started, he originally heard about it from rich dad poor dad and went to a seminar. Meanwhile he was serving tables at night and working as a legal assistant during the day. His first deal was gotten after he ‘bugged’ someone for 9 months until they gave him a lead and offered to buy it from him. That first deal was in the April and he immediately told the attorneys at his day job that he would be leaving at the end of the year. This gave him an end date to work towards.
Rodrigo received 40 leads a month and from that he gets 2-3 deals a month that actually work. The deals originally came in through cold calling and online work and then a year ago he started to do direct mail and this is the focus now. The shift to direct mail has been successful; where cold calling would take 2-3 hours a day on the whole now they spend less time for get the same returns. Rodrigo is mailing people from lists that he’s purchased online focussing on absentee landlords. He also goes to the court house once a week to pull the leads and sends mail to them as well. Rodrigo got involved with his local RAE straight away; it’s not necessarily good for leads but it’s good for relationships for private money and questions.
Top tips
- Most important habit – journal every day and keep a goal for the year
- Most influential person – the one who helped with first deal
- Most important tool – CRM Zoho
- Most influential failure – trusting people just because they’re older than you
- Contact – avlrealestate.com