January 15, 2026 – Second Act Jay Samit and Real Estate On Your Terms Chris Prefontaine

0:04 Intro 1

Broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration award-winning School for Startups Radio, where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk, or passion. Jim Beach,

0:26 Jim Beach

Hello everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for Startups Radio. I hope you’re out there having a great day, making some money, riding the roller coaster life of being an entrepreneur. We are here to provide a little bit of motivation, a little bit of get off the sofa, a little bit of tips, tricks, techniques to make you more successful and to make you a better entrepreneur. We are here just to provide a resource for you. It’s a mosaic. You don’t have to listen to every show, but you can pick and choose. We’ve got so many shows out there in such an incredible index, you should be able to find exactly the businesses and the models that you need to copy. Amazing show today. First up, we have Jay Samit. I’m sorry, Jay Samit. He has been on the show before, and is digital media. The way we listen to music was determined by Jay. They said he had the coolest job in the world. Wired Magazine said that his career at Universal and Sony and EMI just right through the heart of the industry, and now he is giving back. It is an amazing interview, and Jay is an amazing guy. After that, Chris Prefontaine is with us. You know, I hear a lot of flipping guests and guests who are in real estate, doing all sorts of cool things. Chris totally turns half of them on their ear, and makes it look good. He has an incredible business, and is doing it a different way, a different model. He has three ways that he looks for houses in the real estate space, and he’s not, well, he may be flipping them. That’s not necessarily part of the story. What’s so interesting, what’s so interesting is that he’s not having trouble finding houses like everyone else is. All of the flippers talk about how hard and competitive it is right now to find houses. Not for him, using his method. And so it’s incredibly different. It’s a whole different model. And he has a book offer as well. So you do want to do that. On the show tomorrow, we have one of my favorite guests. He’s been with us four or five times, Lod Saffko, the guy who invented Siri, pretty cool. Thanks for being with us today. Great show every day. Great guests, all of them, and we will be right back to get started.

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3:31 Jim Beach

We are back in again. Thank you so very much for being with us. I’m very excited to welcome back to the show Jay Samit. He was on the show maybe 10 years ago, and I’m excited to get caught up and to introduce him to you. His career, I think I could spend the entire 25 minutes that we have just getting you set up for his career. But basically, understand this, he is one of the top two or three people about why media is shaped the way it is today. He started off creating his own company, Jasmine Multimedia, when he was still at UCLA. He got the Presidential fellowship there. That was a LaserDisc and CD-ROM company, and had one of the very first videos on a PC that was sold. He became vice president at Universal Studios in their new media group. He then was with EMI, which we all know is Capitol Records, as executive vice president of new media. He left there to go to Sony, and was called the guru for the entire industry by Variety and Wired. Imagine this, everyone who works at Wired has got a great job. One of the Wired people says that Jay has the coolest job in the industry of Hollywood. I mean, how that must be amazing. He was also then the president of OVO, and worked with all of the largest companies there in the ad space. It was the best app of the year, best of the year, or several things, and also Venture Summit Company of the Year, on and on and on and on. And today we’re going to be talking about the books and the talks that he gives. He is a best-selling author with several books. He has a new one coming out that we will talk about, called Second Act Advantage. My goodness, Jay, it just goes on and on. Welcome. How you doing?

5:27 Jay Samit

Thanks for having me. I’m like all your listeners. I started with an idea, figured out the startup game, and then I’ve spent the past 10 years paying it forward, teaching entrepreneurs how to do it. My second book, you might recall Future Proofing. I took a homeless immigrant, mentored him one day a year, gave him no money, no business contacts, and he went from homeless to self-made millionaire. Anybody can learn how to do this. I just try to shorten the journey for others, and The Second Act Advantage is about people having a second swing at success, and really how AI can augment everything you do so you can do it cheaper, quicker, faster to success, or changing the world.

6:16 Jim Beach

All right, let’s go ahead and talk more about the book. Great introduction. Do you mean second act after you retire at 65, or do you mean second act after you did your first one in your 20s? What is second

6:28 Jay Samit

So it’s different for everybody. I’ve worked with pro athletes that, you know, are at the top of their game, the most famous names in the world, and by 30, that’s behind them. Or somebody may have done 20 years in the military, or whatever it is, and you accomplished all that. And the idea, if you wait until 65 and you retire, studies show you’re going to be miserable, depressed. As you know, I’ve worked with most of the tech billionaires, and many of them, when they retired, they had no plan, and they were miserable. The money didn’t make them happy. So The Second Act Advantage shows you how to figure out what your purpose is, what drives you, what you really want to achieve, because that’s where joy comes from. So whether it’s about building something to make money or building something to change, we all have that in us, and it’s the biggest untapped resource, getting everybody, the generation that wasn’t digitally native, to see what AI can do. I was chairman of one of the big, big AI companies, and it is so easy. You don’t have to hire scores of people, you don’t raise tons of money, and you can instantly launch global businesses.

7:47 Jim Beach

Who are you involved with AI-wise? I didn’t know that. Yeah.

7:52 Jay Samit

So I was chairman of Versus, and we, one of the most successful models out there, gone for very specific business-to-business uses. But one of the things that I built with this book, which no one’s done yet, is the problem with a book: you put all your best efforts into it, but by the time it’s printed, parts of it are out of date. There’s always new AI tools, always new things. We built a custom AI mentor that’s free and a companion to the book, so you now have your own custom digital Jay to guide you through all the steps of building your business or mapping out your future. And it’s not just about the business part. It’s also, what are the easiest ways and things that you can do with the least effort to live an extra 28 years. So the science has changed since all of us left high school, and it’s very easy and very minor things to tweak your life. I’m not talking about taking 100 supplements a day and five hours in the gym. Most of what we’re taught is obsolete. So now you have digital Jay that comes with The Second Act Advantage.

9:05 Jim Beach

And that’s an AI that’s designed to push you forward, right? So it’s not going to just sit there and wait for you. It’s going to ask what you did today with your health and exercise and business building, all

9:19 Jay Samit

Well, whatever. You’ll go through and take different self evaluations in the book. Now, what drives you, what gives you satisfaction? We’re each different, and I’ve met amazing people. Every time I do a book, I meet people that make me feel like I’ve wasted my life because they’ve achieved so much, and it’s so inspirational. But yeah, so this was trained, not on large language models, on the things that I’ve read, the hundreds of medical studies, all the books I’ve written, all my comms for Fortune or for Wall Street Journal, and it’s a very specific approach to success. I’m not selling people things you don’t. You write a book to pay it forward. You can’t go and get the Jay seminar. You can’t get the Jay t-shirt. I’m not out there trying to make money off of people. I believe entrepreneurs are the only people that solve problems. They don’t sell things, they sell solutions. So the more people solving problems, the better our world is. And we’re going to have major disruption. Middle management will be eviscerated by AI. So unless you start figuring out how to focus on the things that are important, critical thinking, creative thinking, communicating, collaborative, everything else AI can do. But AI can augment you in ways that people aren’t focusing on. It’s not just about using it like Google to ask a question.

10:46 Jim Beach

All right, I know how it’s augmenting me, and I’ll give that after. Jay, how is it augmenting you? There you go.

10:56 Jay Samit

I’ll give you a great example. So it’s not a great writer. Anybody that’s turning term papers in high school, it’s probably good for that at this stage. But when I finished the book, I asked three different AI models the same question. I want this to be the definitive book on the topics that are in it. What’s missing? And they each spit out things, and most of them were things that weren’t in the book because I didn’t want it in there, but they also had things that didn’t occur to me. So it is really the key that every solo entrepreneur really needs is somebody that can bounce their ideas back, that will tell them their ideas suck. I mean, the biggest mistake people do is falling in love with their idea. When you start a business, your real goal should be finding every way that that business can fail, because if you can make it fail before you start spending your money, you’re going to have a better chance of success. And once you get that zombie idea that no one can kill, then raising money is easy. And by the way, the most successful group of people raising money from VCs are the 40 plus crowd, because they’ve learned from other mistakes.

12:10 Jim Beach

Jay, what are those three engines that you ran the text through?

12:17 Jay Samit

Perplexity, ChatGPT, and I don’t have in front of me which one I did the other, but I mean, I play with everything. Okay. By the way, I list in one of the chapters the 110, at present, best tools for all the various things you might want to do with AI. And again, you can then go to the digital Jay AI and say, you know, I like Canvas. Is there anything new or better, and why? And so it’ll keep all that information up to date, because it is exploding, and no one can be on top of all. It’s like trying to memorize websites in the year 2000.

13:07 Jim Beach

Yes, I’m using it for writing. And the thing that I’ve enjoyed doing is putting in a chapter and saying, what’s good and bad about this chapter. And as you said, I love your definition, making it the definitive work. I haven’t gone that far yet. I’m just saying, making this a good paragraph or a good chapter, and it gives such great advice, and then it will give you a grade. And either I’m learning to write to it, or I’m writing better, but my grades are going up, and I feel like my writing is getting better. Well, I’ll tell you a true story, a better writer, yeah.

13:46 Jay Samit

Well, anything that can give you honest criticism makes you better. When another person does it, our egos get involved, like, you know, “Oh, you think you can do better. How are you now?” That’s why the relationship with an editor that you have on your book is so important. But here’s the most amazing thing. So as I said, because of my prior job as chairman, I was playing with all the AI tools and trying to see who’s winning and what’s not working at this stage, because AI today is as dumb as it’ll ever be. It’ll get better and everything. But one day, for the fun of it, I try to ask AI things that it cannot know the answer to. So I asked it, and this was last summer, what book should Jay Samit write next? Now, I was not planning to write another book. My first book’s in 14 languages, and, you know, I’ve achieved everything that I’ve wanted, but it said something that would have never occurred to me. Like a cartoon character, my jaw went to the floor, my tongue rolled out. I go, wow, that’s a great idea. And basically it said, to make it to 60, most likely you’re going to make it to 90, which means your post-career years are longer than your career. What will the world gain now that you have the time to focus on it? And that was a big question. That’s the why are we here? And so part of what this book hopes to guide people through is, why are you here? What do you want to do? And here’s the legacy piece. Every other empire disappears. You try to build your legacy, in 100 years, nobody’s going to remember anything, but everything we create now is being absorbed into the AI models, which means the impact of what you create in your lifetime can have a lasting impact for future generations. So what problem do you want to solve? And I’ll give you a great example. One of the gentlemen in the book was a retired civil engineer getting his oil change, waiting for the oil change, flipping through National Geographic, and sees this picture of guys going across a flooded river hanging on a rope to get to the other side in Africa, because in the rainy season, it floods and you can’t get to schools, hospitals, anything. And he goes, I could build an Indiana Jones-style rope bridge. That’s nothing. And for whatever reason, he got on a plane, went to Africa, and built one of these bridges. And then he started a nonprofit, and he’s built hundreds of them, connecting over 10 million people, changing the courses of whole communities, literacy, health. That’s the impact one person had by just applying themselves. Wow.

16:44 Jim Beach

That makes my 30-foot rope swing in my backyard feel insignificant after that.

16:50 Jay Samit

But he basically says, all of us need to level up our goals. Bill Gates would say, making it to the richest man in the world, you kind of checked every box. He wasn’t happy when he stepped down. He and somebody goaded him on, saying, you know, you’re not going to be remembered as the world’s richest guy. There’s always another richest guy. But you know what you’ll be remembered for? What if you were the first person to wipe out a disease on the planet? Never been done. That got Bill conspiring again. That got him. Why isn’t it? We have the vaccines. How do you get them out? How to do this. In the past 25 years since he retired, he cut infant childhood mortality in half globally. Let that sink in for a second. That’s millions of lives at a time when we’re not reproducing. Most countries aren’t reproducing themselves. That changes the entire planet. Those are the types of big swings that all of us can take entire planet. Those are the types of big swings that all of us can take.

17:51 Jim Beach

Jay, I want to totally change the topic here, please. Now that our music is in zeros and ones, right? Is it going to evolve again? You were responsible for so many of the evolutions of music and all the way that we present our data and our content. Can I stop buying The White Album now? I’m tired of buying a version of The White Album just because it’s on a new media other than storage devices. Are we at the base of what media and music can be, zeros and ones, or so again?

18:32 Jay Samit

So it’s evolving astronomically in two ways. So for your listeners that don’t know my background, I was the person that brought the music industry into the digital era, you know, licensing the iTunes, licensing the Pandoras and the subscriptions and making all that mess happen. And after a few years of doing everything that you could possibly do, 100 pitches of startups of the same bad idea over and over, I would have bet you there’s nothing new coming down the pike. And then you see Udio or the other AI music generation things now. Putting legal aspects of how they got so good to the side, the idea that anyone with no music background can instantly create phenomenal music, chart-topping music, with no musicians, no vocalists, no studio, in split seconds is mind-blowing. So as a tool, just as computer graphic artists could suddenly revise things faster than a person could do with paint, people with music background can now create better, and people that just are fans can create. And I mean, the mixtapes that I’m making nowadays, to use my generation’s language, of songs for special occasions are just funny things. It’s phenomenal. And so you’re going to see an amazing amount of music. You’ve already seen completely AI bands top the country charts. You’re seeing this music appear in your mix, and you don’t even realize it’s in there. If you let Spotify make your playlist, more than 5% of what you’re listening to is created by AI.

20:34 Jim Beach

That sounds horrible to me, Jay. On the other hand, I’m a capitalist, and if they can make something that sells, people give their money, then Godspeed, you know. But I just hate the idea that some, you know, poor 14-year-old kid who’s trying to break into the music industry also has to compete with someone who says, all right, take all of the Taylor Swift songs and average them together and write a song for me on the 57 Chevy, you know.

21:06 Jay Samit

And why not go the other way? A 14-year-old really has this pulse from what 14-year-olds like, but 50-year-old guys running labels just don’t get it. He can now go direct and instantly monetize. I mean, it was an out-of-work musician who wasn’t making any money putting his stuff up on YouTube that created Patreon to see if he could make tips, and he built a billion-dollar business. So this tool now empowers that kid, takes out all the gatekeepers in between. Now, if he gets a big enough following, that 50-year-old at the label is going to say, wow, this kid just sold 100 million tracks. Let’s get him touring. Let’s get him out there. Let’s put an organization around him so he can be, you know, the next Taylor Swift. Not that I think anybody can be the next Taylor Swift. She is a once-in-a-generation.

22:12 Jim Beach

You really believe that. I know you’re an artist as well. I was looking at your artwork, and I thought it was beautiful, very colorful, fun to look at. So obviously, you have a taste, you have art, you have culture. I don’t know that it’s maybe my bias. I certainly, oh, I don’t know what to say. Let me cut you off. Go ahead. Go ahead. You explain. You’re the artist.

22:42 Jay Samit

Let’s not comment on whether you like or do not like the songs. Okay. To have achieved billion-dollar tours, oh yeah. To have stayed at the top for so long, to be thriving at a time when the entire music industry contracted massively, that’s a talent.

23:08 Jim Beach

Yes, and I would give the Kardashians the same kudos. Zero talent, but they are now, what, seven billionaires in the family or something.

23:21 Jay Samit

That’s a talent. I’ll give you one that hits both and gets back to The Second Act Advantage, because I talk about her, an absolute idol of mine, Dolly Parton. I love her. You would agree she’s achieved everything in music possible, everything in movies possible. Okay. And left, right, and center of the political spectrum, everybody loves her. Yeah, that’s an amazing thing to do. Okay, here’s what you didn’t know. Do you know what her second act was? The books. When she turned 50, she realized she achieved everything that she’d ever dreamed of and more, but she grew up in a small rural town. Her father was illiterate, so she decided she was going to buy a book a month for every preschooler in her town, so they could have a fighting chance when they got to school. And it so changed her town, because now parents and kids would read together. She did it for the state of Tennessee, then she did it for the United States, then she did it for English-speaking countries. 200 million books she’s given away, no fanfare, no putting her name in front of it, and she has changed the world. She’s opened up the world to disadvantaged youth. That’s a second act. That’s what we need to inspire everybody to do. I’m not impressed by somebody that gets a $500 million yacht or wants to go joy riding into space for five minutes. I really like people that said, you know what, I’ve been blessed. I worked hard, but I also got lucky. Let me help somebody else get lucky. And that’s where joy comes from. The most joyous thing of my life happened by circumstance. I wrote that first book, Disrupt You, to try to help people. I didn’t expect ten years on to still be getting daily emails from over 100 countries around the world of people saying that it changed their life. I didn’t do the work, they did. I just helped them take the blinders off. That’s the impact each of us can have because we’re so connected, one click away from billions of people. So hopefully I can show people how to turn their dreams into plans and their plans into change for both them, their families

25:52 Jim Beach

and for all of us. Yes, very well said. I want to add one thing about Dolly Parton. She’s the only celebrity that I can think of that’s also taken an entire region, their home region, and redone the economy of that region with her Dollywood and all of the other things she’s done that’s now, I’d say, worst parts, countries now, incredibly successful.

26:18 Jay Samit

Akon’s done that in Africa. I mean, there’s been others that never forgot their roots, but to do it globally, you know. And then you can also, you know, you know that I would always guilt every major rock act, every time there’s a disaster, we put on a concert, and, you know, after Katrina or tsunami and everything, and they understood, you know, this is, you got to give back. And then I think of Silicon Valley. There’s a lot of people with way too many digits that aren’t trying to lift up those that need help.

27:04 Jim Beach

Jay, one final question. How do we get ready for a second act? What do we do to make that transition, take that first step? What’s that first action item look like?

27:16 Jay Samit

So the first thing is acknowledging that it’s going to be a long period of time. So I have one chapter in the book, which I have to argue with people. People that don’t know me, I never played a sport. I had a note out of PE. I’m a lazy nerd. I’m everything that you think a high-tech nerd would be. So for me to tell you that I’m going to tell you how to live a healthy lifestyle, you’d be going, what? So I have a chapter called The Lazy Nerd’s Biohacking Guide to a Longer Life, nine simple things that give you about 28 extra years. And I’ll tell you two fun ones that you probably didn’t learn from mom and dad. One, two orgasms a week gives you about seven extra years of life. It can, read the science. I’ve got dozens of pages of footnotes of all the scientific

28:11 Jim Beach

Alien women, both sexes, correct. Okay, it’s

28:17 Jay Samit

what your brain then releases and dealing with stress and all the other stuff. I mean, we know stress isn’t good. We know don’t drink, don’t do opioids, all those things. The other one that really surprised me, having a dog, you’ll recover from a stroke faster. You’ll live longer. Cats don’t count. Goldfish don’t count. Turtles, gerbils, you know, something about man’s best friend has truly proven, actually, you live longer.

28:45 Jim Beach

You don’t have to walk, so you have to walk a dog. And I think that’s it. It makes you go outside with the dog.

28:51 Jay Samit

I think one of the things that I talk about in the book, one of the top drivers of longevity, when I looked at the Blue Zones, they first zeroed in on diet, right? And I talked about intermittent fasting and all those things, but what they missed was people having their purpose to get out of bed every day and having that social connection. And that’s what The Second Act Advantage really sets you on the path. If you’re money-motivated, you need money, you want more money for your family, that can be your motivation. We’ll show you how to do it. If it’s about creating a nonprofit or changing something that way. If it’s about just doing something local in community, something that gives you that purpose is really what’s going to give you decades of joy. I’ve had more fun flying around, speaking, and meeting entrepreneurs in all these countries as the book continues to go out, and it reinvigorates me. It gives me the energy I had when I was in my 20s. I’m like, I mean, my book came out in Lithuanian, my book came out in Thai. I didn’t imagine that what I was saying was applicable to everybody, and that’s what I want people to think about. You really, it’s your world. And AI means you don’t have to raise the amount of money, you don’t employ the number of people, and you can build businesses very quickly and make your mark.

30:24 Jim Beach

Jay Samit, S-A-M-I-T dot com. Jay, how else do you want people to reach out to you, find you, all that, please? Get a book.

30:33 Jay Samit

You can find me on Instagram. You can get the book, The Second Act Advantage. It’s up on Amazon right now. And I’d love to hear from readers and have fun playing with the AI Jay, thank

30:46 Jim Beach

you so much for being with us. Great stuff, and we’d love to have you back, not a ten-year wait this time. Okay, take care, and we will be right back.

31:02 Intro 2

That’s a, that’s a, that’s a wonderful question, actually. Oh my gosh, I love the opportunity to do this. Thank you, Jim. Wow, that’s, that’s, that’s a great one. You know, that is a phenomenal question. That’s a great question, and I don’t have a great answer. Oh, that is such a loaded question, and that’s actually a really good question.

31:29 Jim Beach

School for Startups Radio, it’s time to talk a little bit of real estate. Welcome back to the show. Thank you for being with us. Very excited to welcome a true expert in the field. Please welcome Chris Prefontaine to the show. He is chairman and founder of the Smart Real Estate Coach group. He is a four-time best-selling author, Forbes Business Council member, and a three-time Inc 5000 honoree. He leads the Wicked Smart community across the North American continent, helping students complete real estate transactions, and his podcast is in the top 0.5% globally of shows. Damn impressive. Chris, welcome to the show. How are you doing? I’m awesome, Jim. Thanks for having me, buddy. So how do we get started in real estate? I have a house paid for, and I want to get into some real estate. What do I do?

32:25 Chris Prefontaine

Cool question, because we don’t go to banks. So we teach people how to buy without leveraging their own credit, without leveraging their own cash. So keep your equity and learn how to buy what we call creatively, or in my book, Real Estate On Your Terms, which is just creative real estate. You don’t have to tap into banks. You don’t have to tap into cash. How we buy, three ways. Let me just give you the three, top level. You can peel back whatever piece you want. We buy owner financing. So let’s say you’re free and clear, no mortgage, but you’re looking to keep that cash flow coming, and you don’t need the money right now. You also would like a premium. I could buy your house. I’m going to make monthly payments to you until some date in the future where there’s a balloon payment. Now, as a seller who’s not stressed financially, they love that because they’re getting money over time and they’re getting a premium on their property. So that’s one way, owner financing. Another way is subject to existing financing. Opposite avatar to a free and clear person. Let’s take the homeowner who either has two or three homes or had a life event, is stressed out financially. They got a mortgage. They got to pay their mortgage. Might be 2, 3, 4, 5% left over from the good rate days. We go ahead and we buy that property. Mortgage stays in the seller’s name, though, Jim. So we don’t take on any personal signatures or take on any personal debt. We make payment on their behalf, and they’re relieved of the pressure of the payment, and we own a house for no money down. The third way is lease purchase. Lease purchase is the only way out of the three you don’t own. You control the property, and you control it for a whopping $10. That’s how our agreements are built. So those are three ways we buy. And just a little context, it came from the crash. I’ve been at this 34 and a half years, but after the crash of Olis, I was dead broke. So by 2012, I said, well, how can I even buy property? I got no credit, got no money. And that was a force into creative real estate time for me, and that has then morphed into what you said in your introduction.

34:23 Jim Beach

All right, so I’ve interviewed flippers and some real estate people in the past. You’re not the first real estate person I’ve talked to. From what I understand right now, it’s incredibly hard to find properties, and now you’ve made it even more difficult by having these criteria, which I agree are great. I wholeheartedly buy in. But it seems to me that in a market where it’s already really hard to find properties, that with these criteria, it would be impossible to find properties.

34:54 Chris Prefontaine

Good question. Let me address it. So flippers, wholesalers, they are a group of people. They are driving a ton of business to us, because they have to, remember, buy your property at 60 or 70 cents on the dollar. That’s their model. It’s not good, bad, or otherwise. That’s their model. We can pay full market price. So actually, finding our properties is much, much easier whenever there’s uncertainty in the marketplace. Whether it be political, interest rates, doesn’t matter. Whenever that happens, it drives more volume to us from the creative standpoint. So it’s actually a complete opposite of what any flipper, a wholesaler, or fix-and-flip person would feel, because the market’s wide open to us. I’ll give you an example. Out of all the people we speak with on a regular basis, and we have virtual assistants making those dials, about 38% of the people are at least open to learning more about how they can sell their house creatively. Because the only people we can’t help creatively, the only ones we can’t, is someone that says, I need X amount of my equity out to go buy this other house for my family, period. I can’t wait. That’s the only person we can’t help. Everybody else we can help. So we’re dealing with mostly off-market properties.

36:01 Jim Beach

Plentiful right now. Okay, so you do it all through telephone dialing. You said

36:07 Chris Prefontaine

Mostly, Jim, yeah. Mostly because when I started, I was dead broke. I couldn’t afford to do a mailing or anything back after the crash. So everything’s been built on live calls from virtual assistants. Kind of get the cream of the crop and then hand them off to us as investors.

36:23 Jim Beach

All right, so using all those methods, you’re still finding tons of properties.

36:29 Chris Prefontaine

Yeah. We do the communities in 80 markets right now. I mean, we do our own as a family. We also revenue share and do deals with people around the country. So we’re in 80 markets right now and doing deals regularly.

36:40 Jim Beach

All right, so if I want to work with you, is that possible?

36:45 Chris Prefontaine

Yeah, yeah. We have a bunch of free stuff. I’m big on free, Jim, only because you, me, and everyone else gets bombarded on social media and other avenues with buy this thing and, you know, good luck, get rich quick tomorrow, all these crazy things out there. I’m big on free. We have 500 or so deals posted on YouTube. We’ve been doing that for eight years now or so, and now 12 years of business. And if they want to grab a free book, I’ll give them a free book. And I don’t mean free, put $10 in or $8 in for shipping, not that free. I mean totally free. All they got to do is go to three, the number three, threepaydaysbooks.com forward slash startups, and they’ll get that package for no charge. I just need an address.

37:25 Jim Beach

What was that again? Three? What, three

37:29 Chris Prefontaine

Paydays, with an S, books. Threepaydaysbooks.com forward slash startups, so I know it came from you guys.

37:48 Jim Beach

Well, I’m going to do that myself. There you go. All right, so the criteria that you’re using, these are people that the flippers would not even know about yet, right? Is that the trick?

37:57 Chris Prefontaine

You know, a lot of the people that teach, I’m talking decades, teach real estate, are teaching, well, you got to wholesale first. That’s your way into real estate. And I just, huge, huge disagreement there with me. And there’s a myth out there that people have to do that because they’re putting themselves in another J-O-B. That’s all they’re doing. And they’re putting themselves in a position where, if they’re not great on the phone, they got to try to convince a seller to sell their house at 60 or 70 cents on the dollar. It’s just not necessary. So there’s just a plethora of properties out there right now where you can literally, on the phone, feel the defensiveness come down when you say, no, I just want to buy your property. I can pay full price. Just depends if you can wait on your money or not. And just the amount of conversations we spark because of that are dramatically different than, say, a flipper or a wholesaler.

38:44 Jim Beach

Yeah, that would be totally different. Why can you afford to pay full price? Time?

38:51 Chris Prefontaine

Let me give you a quick example. So I buy your house in that example earlier, and you’re free and clear. I’m making monthly principal payments to you. So every single month I make a payment, principal is coming down over time. That crushes the principal. So I need time. That’s all I need. I don’t care about the price. I need time. Facetious example, sell me a house, million-dollar house, I’ll, you know, I’ll pay a million and a half if I had, you know, 50 years to make payments on. I’m giving you a facetious example. But the point is, price is not the issue. The term is very, very important.

39:25 Jim Beach

Well, that’s always true. In other cases, it might as well be true in real estate too. 100%. Yeah, but they always say that you make money on the purchase price.

39:40 Chris Prefontaine

Again, a bit of a myth, depending on what niche you’re talking about. Because, again, I can make, let me give you a hard example. I don’t want to do theory. I want to give examples. We bought a million-dollar house, actually 945,000, on the water down by Cape Cod in Massachusetts, resort area. This was from a broker. She was herself a broker, could not sell the property. We paid top dollar for her that she could not get it so far on the open market. And over a four-year time period extracted with our trademark, three paydays, we extracted almost a quarter million. I think it was like 230-something thousand dollars out of that property. That’s because we’re doing it creatively, and we’re doing it over time, not trying to get in there and steal something and try to flip it quick. Big, big, big difference.

40:27 Jim Beach

Then, do you rent that property?

40:30 Chris Prefontaine

Good question. We mostly fill it, for the time we have today in the show, we mostly fill it with rent-to-own people. So that’s that house is a good example. It’s a million-dollar house. Who would be a perfect candidate for that? Someone who left corporate America, they’re making a nice six-figure salary, plus sometimes seven, but guess what? They started their own business, and they’re not financeable. Despite having money in the bank, despite having great credit, they can’t go get a bank loan. They need about two years of what the bank calls seasoning. We put people like that in these homes. They just need time. They’re great, great buyers. They deserve it. They just need time. We put them in a rental home program, in that house anywhere between two and four years. Then they are able to get their own mortgage and cash that out, and that’s when we all cash out.

41:15 Jim Beach

All right, how many properties are you doing a year now, Chris, or how do you measure your volume?

41:24 Chris Prefontaine

Yeah, our family company continues to do anywhere between two and five or six a month. When I say our family company, just myself, my son, my son-in-law, locally, here in New England. And then since 2014, when we started mentoring and coaching work in the field with students, those 80 markets right now will produce this year somewhere in the vicinity of eight to ten properties a month on average out there in the community somewhere. And that means not our property, it’s just people we’re teaching doing deals within the trenches, and we revenue share, Jim. So we have a long-term interest in seeing the student win versus, hey, here’s a program, you know, get rich quick tomorrow, buy it and good luck. We’re in the trenches with these guys doing the deals until they end, which could be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years.

42:11 Jim Beach

So how does that look, Chris? I want to hire you to be my trainer, my helper. Sure, that

42:18 Chris Prefontaine

Look, there’s different ways of doing it in our community. Again, just for time-wise today, we have group coaching, where they’ll go through group coaching for 12 weeks. They get to come on as many as five different touches a week and get guidance on their deal. And then we have what’s called the associate levels. Associate levels are more hands-on, one-on-one, as needed. I could talk to you, if you were an active student in our community, I could be talking to you 1, 2, 3, 4 times a day, especially if you got deals going on. So it’s as needed, more one-on-one. It just depends on how fast somebody wants to go and how aggressive they want to be. Because someone is trying to leave a job and replace a sizable income. Others are trying to just tinker on the side and do a deal or two a year, because it’s so profitable. Just depends on the individual’s goals.

43:05 Jim Beach

So of the 80 markets, you know, here in Atlanta right now, we say that it’s definitely a, I don’t remember what it is. Real estate is incredibly scarce here in Atlanta. Does that make it a buyer or a seller’s market?

43:22 Chris Prefontaine

Well, if there’s not much inventory out there, then it’s certainly not a buyer’s market, right? That’s a seller’s market. But in Atlanta, I could think of two students. One is the next fighter pilot who’s in our community, just did two deals recently. They were in the category. His name is Lance. They were in the category of buying a property where the seller was hurting, they needed financial relief, and we were able to get in there and take over that payment and install our buyer. So I don’t care what market you’re in. Atlanta, pick LA, I mean, we have one of our coaches in LA. Most people would say, well, it’s a great market. Okay, but always, in any market, there are properties that aren’t selling. There are properties that are off market, where sellers are perhaps distressed and don’t want to be public with it. There’s all kinds of these things that go on behind the scenes. You just need to know how to find those, I’ll call them niche lists.

44:15 Jim Beach

Okay, so what is the niche list? Is there a list that you can buy of people who are paid up.

44:24 Chris Prefontaine

There’s so many lists. So let me start basics. When someone starts with us, they start having their virtual assistant and or themselves call on the basic for-sale-by-owner person who has their property out there advertising that it is for sale. They call on expired listings. Those are listings that realtors, for whatever reason, couldn’t sell. Could be functional, could be price, could be whatever. Then the niche list would be someone that says, hey, I’m going through these lead sources, and I need more leads to accomplish my goals. So when we start looking at, okay, in Atlanta, why don’t we pull people in certain zip codes, all properties that are free and clear, they don’t have a mortgage, and they have out-of-state addresses. So someone that’s out of state, perhaps a second home, for example, those are great lists. I’ve liked that list for over a decade. Out-of-state, free and clear owners, because, A, they usually are out of the market. B, they want top dollar. And C, they can wait. That’s perfect for us in the owner financing environment. And so I picked Atlanta, but you could pick any market and do that exact same thing. You can also pick any market and say, give me all properties with an interest rate of 2 and three-quarters to 5 and a half that was originated during such and such days, perhaps during COVID. You can get that list, and you can also stipulate if it has little equity or if it’s behind on taxes. So there’s all kinds of ways to say who might need my help, just by looking at the list, and then have the virtual assistants touch base with them.

45:54 Jim Beach

These American or overseas virtual assistants both.

45:59 Chris Prefontaine

Actually, we’ve got a gentleman that’s in the States who’s been with me since 2013. The amount of calls this, this, this gentleman makes is beyond me, how we mentally can keep at it. But we have him, and then we have an entire company that we used to train and run ourselves that we said, to heck with this. We’re in the real estate business, not the VA, the virtual assistant business. So we have them running it themselves, and most of them are in the Philippines. However, they’re all trained on creative. So you mentioned earlier about flippers and wholesalers, that’s a different phone call, as we kind of just alluded to earlier, where they got to steal the property. Literally, these virtual assistants are trained in creative. I don’t know many outfits that can actually have that type of option available for people. So our community all has access to them, so they’re getting the right script in there, and they get the right leads coming forward to them. All right, excellent.

46:54 Jim Beach

You know, the idea that the script is different is such a game changer. Chris, I’m sitting here kind of baffled that I hadn’t heard this before, you know, because I’ve interviewed so many flippers. Yeah, this seems a little counterintuitive, but once you think about it for a second, it makes a ton of sense. Yeah.

47:16 Chris Prefontaine

I mean, look, I was in business for, gosh, before the crash, I think it was like 17 years. Tim, picture that, right? And people say to me, well, why didn’t you do that then? I don’t know, same as you just said. I kind of heard about it on the peripheral, but it never really put my hands around it. And so this stuff has been around since, it predated banking. It’s not new. All we did is develop some systems, develop some support to help people understand it and run with it, and then trademark some really cool things around it. We added one other component. You and I talked with the difference of the script. But check this out now. So you’re on the phone, you call, and you don’t have to try to steal the property. And on top of that, if you’ve gone through our academy, you get certified in what we call the Creative Financing Real Estate Association. So when a seller says, well, yeah, you know, I get all these calls from wholesalers or flippers, and your simple reply would be something along the lines of, are they certified with the Creative Financing Real Estate Association? Likely not, if they’re just wholesaling and flipping. And so that puts you kind of as the authority in that marketplace and gets rid of all the other calls. It just came in. It’s a game changer. So that, and the fact you can pay a better price, really differentiates yourself when you’re in the creative, creative world, in our community.

48:31 Jim Beach

And that’s your own certification, isn’t it?

48:34 Chris Prefontaine

We built it nationally, yeah. And then they get certified by going through the course, and then they have to take a quiz at the end of each one, and they’ve got to be above 70% when they’ve done that. So like a sort of like a continuing ed, right?

48:48 Jim Beach

But it’s brilliant that you’re creating the certificate and then going out there and bragging about it and then bashing the people who don’t have it. I mean, that’s brilliant to create the certificate and market it as the differentiator.

49:02 Chris Prefontaine

Well, especially when they’re brand new, right? When people are brand new. I mean, like these people come from corporate America, they’ve had no experience other than buying their own home. So to give them a little sort of leg up or crutch and support, if you will, it builds their confidence. And after a few phone calls, then they start to get their own legs, so to speak. Yeah.

49:22 Jim Beach

Yeah. So how many of the markets are seller’s markets right now in the country?

49:30 Chris Prefontaine

Oh, gosh, hard to say, Jim. I’d be, I’d be, good question, but I’d be guessing. What’s really cool is we tend to be, our community tends to be a microcosm of society, in that when I get on, say, Slack, or I get with everyone, or I get on my weekly mastermind calls, I get a sense for pockets around the country. But I can’t tell you that I’ve tallied it and said these are buyers and these are sellers. I do watch the ebbs and flows, like in Florida right now, they’re getting crushed, and even the rents have dropped there. And it’s not, can I find property, it’s, I can’t. What can I pick out of all these properties that are available because people are trying to dump property now, that would be actually good, even in creative, because there’s so much to pick from in Florida. Whereas I go to, let’s, let’s say Atlanta, it’s a whole different market. I’m going to have to go look for those niche lists. Versus in Florida, just kind of harvesting and looking at the deals. They’re entirely different. So when people say to me, your question was so good, because people say to me on radio and podcast, hey, what do you think about the market, or where’s the market going, it’s, that’s too, way too broad. The better question is how you asked it, or what are the pockets in the country that are hot versus Florida being dead, right? So, so good question. I just don’t have 

a tally down a global scale.

50:45 Jim Beach

And what about New England? I’ve thought that New England is going to have real estate problems over time, people leaving, going south, decreasing populations in some states. I would get out of New England. Why is that?

51:02 Chris Prefontaine

Yeah, you know, New England along the water, I happen to be along the water. I’m in Newport, Rhode Island. So anywhere along next

51:08 Jim Beach

Door to Biden, I remember. That’s right. You, what? You live next door to Biden? I remember that now.

51:14 Chris Prefontaine

He’s a little bit further. About, what’s he, he’s in Delaware, something. I don’t know where he is. He’s not gladly, so a lot of waterfront here. So those areas are not suffering. In fact, it was an article recently that my wife combs through the conventional stuff nonstop, and she said, did you realize in Rhode Island they’re saying that they’re holding steady, if not increasing? It’s because of the waterfront. But if you go more inland, to your point, in New England, is it softening a bit? Yeah, we’re seeing more expired listings, meaning realtors that aren’t able to sell. So we’ve seen that pop up. That’s an indication. But other than that, if you’re along the water, you’re, you’re, I don’t want to say it’s ironclad, but you’re protected more. Yep.

51:52 Jim Beach

Well, everyone loves to live against the water, especially with the oceans rising, but we’re close to it anyway, not on it.

52:03 Jim Beach

And what is it like working with your family? Does that always work out? Do you have to reprimand them every once? How do you reprimand your son-in-law?

52:13 Chris Prefontaine

Yeah, you know what? Over the years, Tim, people ask me, how did you develop that? And, you know, the fact is, I did not pre-think it. It was all organic. And let me explain. In 14, my son Nick came on board because I needed help. As I was picking up speed with my own properties, I needed help getting rid of them. And then the next year, in 15, my son-in-law, Zach, and my daughter Kayla were in the bartending business here in Newport, Rhode Island area. Good money, rotten lifestyle, right? So they said, can we come in? Sure. And over the years, it’s kind of morphed into, Nick loves the disposition side of the business. My son-in-law, Zach, loves running and building the teams and doing the seller side. So we’ve morphed into our own roles. And as far as the family dynamic, what we’ve done is built values and purpose and mission around the entire build of the company. So when a decision comes up, it’s not a family personality issue or an opinion issue. It’s, does it fit the values, yes or no. So whether we’re in the meeting or not, it doesn’t matter, but it tends to separate that family versus business and make it a lot more clear.

53:17 Jim Beach

I love it. Great idea. Chris, very, very impressed. Love to have you back. How do we find out more, get in touch with you, all that, please?

53:26 Chris Prefontaine

Yeah, I appreciate it, Jim, and appreciate you having me. They can go to smartrealestatecoach.com, or they can go ahead and get the free books at three, the number three, paydaysbooks.com forward slash startups.

53:37 Jim Beach

Chris, thank you so much for being with us. Great stuff, and we would love to have you back.

53:42 Chris Prefontaine

Thanks a lot. Thanks. Thanks again, buddy.

53:45 Jim Beach

We are out of time, but you know what we do? That’s right, we come back tomorrow. Be safe. Take care, everyone. Bye. Now you.