The Real Carol Baskin: A Deal Case Study w/ Wes Steimel

Dan Austin: [0:00] Welcome back to another episode of the Collecting Keys Friday Focus. We have today a case study with one of our scale members, Wes Stieml. He's got a heck of an awesome story. I reached out to Wes after this deal closed, was like, we gotta bring this one on, I think this is gonna be a great deal case study just because it's such an odd one, it's great. But Wes, you've been in the scale community for how long have you been? It's been quite a while now. You're like one

Wes Steimel: [0:23] of our OGs. First senior year, I think I joined right beginning of January or February last year.

Dan Austin: [0:29] Yeah. So you're an OG, you went to Keyes Con down in Scottsdale, which was awesome getting to meet you in person, and I had a lot of fun at Keyes Con too. It was super cool to get to see everybody and and all the growth everybody went through, including myself. So Wes, for our audience that doesn't know you, just give us like a quick elevator pitch on you and your business and kind of how long you've been

Wes Steimel: [0:46] doing it and what your business looks like. Sure. Wes Steinlein in the Kansas City market, been doing real estate full time for a little less than two years, left to W two back in, I guess it would have been 2022. Took a little sabbatical family trip for a few months and then really dove in head first and and made it their full time gig towards 01/22.

Dan Austin: [1:07] Yeah. And so you're doing obvious off market, you're wholesaling and flipping, right? Yep. And then do you have a buy and hold portfolio?

Wes Steimel: [1:15] Do you keep any of these properties? Yeah, so actually before I left my w two, I had started collecting rentals back in 2018. Gotcha. And, you know, part of the strategy off market is find stuff that I can keep in my portfolio Mhmm. Wholesale stuff that I don't want, and then also be able to flip Right. Your deals. And my wife got licensed early last year as well so she can sell our slips and we can pocket that commission.

Dan Austin: [1:41] Right. Save a little money there. So do you do you like what you're doing over your old w two?

Wes Steimel: [1:47] Yeah. It's you definitely get, as we'll get into, get to meet a lot more interesting people. Yep. And you could, in the corporate world, a lot more flexibility and you know, there's really no ceiling on what you can earn and you're learning and still community. As you learn how to scale your business, it's using leverage in different ways than just money. Totally. Absolutely, and then you get

Dan Austin: [2:10] to be around cool people and do cool stuff, and you don't have to be eliminated by the confines of your day job.

Wes Steimel: [2:15] Yeah. Okay. Let's dive into this deal, I'm excited to talk about this one. So what kind of property was this? It was a single family house on the North Side Of Kansas City. It was a three bed, two and a half bath, built in the early two thousands. Just a nice property in a nice neighborhood. Yeah. Sounds like the kind of

Dan Austin: [2:33] deal we're all going after, a new build, off market deal. So how did you find it?

Wes Steimel: [2:38] It's a direct mail lead. It came into my system on March 24. 2023? 2023. Okay. Yeah. And I think that mailing had gone out probably the end of twenty twenty two. Okay. So yeah, you mailed it. It was probably the super early January mailing that she called on.

Dan Austin: [2:55] Right on.

Wes Steimel: [2:55] Okay. So yeah, that's kind of

Dan Austin: [2:56] the timeline. This is to be expected. And then what's the seller profile? Who are they? What list did they

Wes Steimel: [3:03] pop up? What did this look like for you? It was a divorce list is where it came from. Oh, okay. So we pulled divorce data from the state website here in Missouri. Use PropStream for data, but it's not very accurate, especially for something with a niche list. So I was pulling that data myself, now my VA does that.

Dan Austin: [3:21] Right. Yeah. PropStream is great for when you're pulling like macro data. Yeah. You The one tough thing about PropStream is, and this goes for any data provider, by the way, it's not just PropStream, is that there is a lag compared to what you can do if you can go into your county website or what, you could always walk into your county and ask for that data. It's going to be the freshest, right? Because the minute that somebody files for divorce, the county gets that record and you can now see that, where PropStream may be three months behind, or a month behind, or something like that. So you kinda get a competitive edge, by getting more accurate data, and more timely data by doing that. And so, I'm assuming, you said your VA does it now, so they just probably go in, log in, or get onto your county website, should say rather, and actually pull down that data, and then you skip trace those people, and get mailing addresses, and phone numbers, and all that?

Wes Steimel: [4:07] Yep. Yep. She's going to the court website, looking up the new divorce filings each week, then we'll jump over to Props Train, or well, you use the county data to find the people and the address where they reside and then go to PropStream and add it to our data list there and then we'll start mailing them. Perfect.

Dan Austin: [4:24] I mean anything that gets recorded at a county, you know, is data that you can use, you know, divorce, obviously, bankruptcies get get filed there as well. Unfortunately, obituaries, you can you can look at those and see, you know, hey, maybe the family wants a quick sale, and, you know, it's an inherited property. So you kind of look at those types of lists. We've also seen police records, know, if there's somebody that gets arrested or has some sort of life event, I will caution you know, you'll look at that and see what kind of records they are and like what you're actually trying to pursue. As you do that and put your own lens of filter on that. But like those are life events where people may need to sell their property, and we can provide services to. Okay, so we know what kind of property this is, the seller was was divorced. Let's talk about the story. So I wanna start with you said you mailed in January, was that the first time you probably mailed this list and then she called in March?

Wes Steimel: [5:17] She would have gotten mailed, the first big batches of mail started going out November, so likely she'd received a couple pieces of mail before she picked up the phone and called me. Okay, you know, that's not uncommon to having to

Dan Austin: [5:28] mail the same person, know, that's why we do it consistently, because they may not pick up the phone on the first one.

Wes Steimel: [5:33] And then you talked to her in March, when did you actually get it under contract? So we got it under contract in would have been August. Wow. So you talked

Dan Austin: [5:45] to her from March to August. Right. It's like how many follow ups were like? A lot of phone follow ups, text follow ups, what did that look like?

Wes Steimel: [5:52] Yeah, there was a lot. So going back to that first call, and this was an invitation of how this thing was gonna play out. So the first call, she called me on March 24. I had actually just walked into the gym, was getting ready to work out with one of my buddies. I didn't make it out to the floor. I sat and listened to her talk to me for over an hour, and then he had to go back to work. Okay. So I just went back to my truck, hopped in. I was going to run an appointment, listened to her talk. She was on the phone for two hours. Wow. I barely said a word, and she was all over the place. So Sure. Her name

Dan Austin: [6:27] was Carol Baskin. Not the Carol Baskin, though.

Wes Steimel: [6:30] Not the Carol Baskin, but Carol Baskin. And so I thought from the call how crazy it sounded and her name,

Dan Austin: [6:37] I thought it

Wes Steimel: [6:37] was just somebody messing with me. You get that from time to time when you send out direct mail, people just call them messing with you. So I kinda wrote it off. Exactly thirty days later, she called me again and asked me if I was still in her. So at that point, I knew she was, one, for real Yep. And two, she was motivated. You know, you send out direct mail to get people to call you. She called me twice. So Yep. From there, I started taking the lead a little more seriously how I probably should have. But in terms of the follow-up, I went back to the CRM and looked. I had 32 connected calls with her. Wow. Sixteen and a half hours of talk time. Wow. And over a 150 texts.

Dan Austin: [7:18] Dang. And that doesn't count the calls you made that she didn't answer. Right. You're saying 32 connected calls. So you're on the phone on average with her for like thirty minutes a call.

Wes Steimel: [7:26] Yeah. Wow. A lot of that was I mean, I had calls that were two and a half hours long, which was a lot of just listening to her talk. Yeah. Towards the end of it, we figured out how to, like, get the information we needed and get back off to Sullivan. Yeah. Yep. But multiple times throughout this, she says that she was committed to me. There was a little snag in that she didn't have any income at the moment. She needed the money from the settlement to even show that she had money in the bank to either qualify to buy a new place or rent a place. So that became a little bit of an issue in in getting the deal done. So she yeah.

Dan Austin: [8:01] Because she was divorced. And when you say settlement, was that settlement from her divorce or a different type of settlement?

Wes Steimel: [8:06] She needed the, I guess the closing, the settlement of our deal, she needed those funds in her bank To move. Qualify to lease a place because she didn't have Right,

Dan Austin: [8:15] and that's not uncommon. That's a tough hurdle we have to hop over as wholesalers a lot of times is like, they wanna sell, but they're kinda stuck. They need the money to move out, and that's usually to get an apartment, or to sometimes buy a new house, or we've had people that they just wanna buy an RV, and if they drive around the country. So it's just what they need to do, so how did you how did you kinda cross that bridge?

Wes Steimel: [8:37] Well, she was kind of squirrelly, so the plan changed multiple times and there's some some history, like, there's some funny things going on and part of the reason that she wanted to sell is she thought that there was a plot to kill her, somebody was hired to kill her, and she'd been assaulted. Sounds like the real Caharl Baskins. Yeah. Oddly enough. So when I walked the house, we were walking up stairs, she said she hadn't been in the basement since she had been assaulted. And there was blood on the walls and blood on the door going out of the basement. And she said that that was from the struggle and there was broken drawers in the kitchen that she said when she was fighting to get a knife. Wild. This is all alleged, there was never any charges filed or anything but this is part of the reason why she needed to leave. Right. In the house, every window in the house had like a wind chime on it, and this is her booby trap. Dang. The steps coming up the back porch had like seven upside down lawn chairs on it so nobody could get up. Jeez. Just an interesting interesting seller. You see some weird stuff out there, I'll

Dan Austin: [9:40] be honest. That's not uncommon.

Wes Steimel: [9:42] Part of the follow-up process was getting to the settlement of the divorce. So the the divorce actually settled in July and that's when the ex husband quick claimed his portion over to her. She got the house in the settlement. K. And then at that point, she was looking for somewhere. She wanted to move to Arizona, but she didn't have enough money to qualify for a loan. She couldn't travel to Arizona to look at places. So it was a lot of trying to help her figure out what the next steps were. Eventually, she found an apartment complex here in Kansas City that would rent to her if she had two years of rent in her bank account. Oh, wow. So that's we had to settle. We had to close. She had to get that money, and then she could move in.

Dan Austin: [10:25] So how did you work that on the paperwork side of things?

Wes Steimel: [10:27] So Because that's basically like, you don't wanna just give somebody money that hasn't moved out, right? Right. So we did we did what we call a post close addendum. We wrote it into the PSA, the purchase sale contract that there would be some post close occupancy, put a little bit of detail on there. And then I wrote up what I call post close addendum to outline how long she was gonna be there, when she needed to be out, and what the penalty was if she wasn't. And we were gonna hold back some funds until she knew. Right. So she

Dan Austin: [10:57] didn't get it all at once. Got some of it enough to get her to move out and then once she moved out, she got the rest.

Wes Steimel: [11:04] And got the balance. And also we negotiated an actual, like a prepaid rent for the weeks that she was there. Nice. Was given to me on the on the settlement statement. Credit and maintenance. Nice. That's always good to do, because really, got

Dan Austin: [11:18] to motivate them, and you're helping them move out, right? So they need those funds to get into this apartment, but you don't also want them to linger around and you know, sit there comfortably because they have no if they have no incentive to move, they're not gonna move fast. And then the risk of that, when some of these, you know, sellers honestly are a flight risk, is that they that money that they got in their bank account, they spend that on other things, and then by the time they move out, they don't have money to get in the apartment, and now you're kinda stuck with an owner that's become a tenant that you have no recourse to get out and you have

Wes Steimel: [11:46] to go through a normal eviction process and you don't wanna do that, so Right. Very smart move on your part. Okay, so

Dan Austin: [11:53] you've got her to the point, you've negotiated the deal, she's in the property, and you've closed. Now what's going on in this deal?

Wes Steimel: [12:03] So we closed on, I think it was September 14 or fifteenth, something like that, and the move out date was set for October 6, And really, it was relatively uneventful from there. She always had issues, things going on in her personal life. This was no exception. But on October 6, she was gone. She called me, said she was out. Utilities had been turned off in her name. We went to secure the property. What she took was, it looked like the clothes on her back and her two dogs, like everything else it. On the house. So Oh, man. It took a little bit more to clean it out than we'd anticipated. I think Sure. It ended up being two thirty yard dumpsters. And it wasn't like it was a hoarder house. It was just there was a lot of stuff. You know? They'd lived there for fifteen years, but the house was 90% remodeled when we got it. That's nice. There was an insurance claim a year and a half previous. Mhmm. And they had done most of the work, and it was during that work that she allegedly was assaulted. Yep. And then all work stopped. Interesting. So what we needed to do was, you know, touch up some paint, install the carpet on the stairs, which was already with the property, install all the lighting, which was already with the property.

Wes Steimel: [13:17] We put in new countertops and cleaned it out really is what we did. So really just all light rehab. Yeah, super light. Yep. Got it. Okay. That's awesome. And so what did

Dan Austin: [13:29] the numbers look like on the back end?

Wes Steimel: [13:31] She pulled to my heartstrings. I offered her just a little bit more because she was in this bad position which Yeah. Again Yeah. We talk about in the community, don't let their situation or some other buyer entering the deal change your numbers. Mhmm. It still worked out for me but it would have worked out better had I stuck with my number. Yeah. We bought it for $262.05. The rehab ended up being $18.01. Yeah. And we sold it for $3.47. Nice. And but there's 10,000 that we gave to the foreclosing cost to the buyer. Yeah. But net between mine and my wife's commission on it, we were right at about 31 k net. That's awesome. I mean, really is awesome. On the market less than seven days, the week of thanksgiving is when we listed. So Yep. I remember when you were selling, mean, moved fast. It was funny because it was a lead that you had worked, because

Dan Austin: [14:21] we talked about this in the community a lot, you know. Yeah. Carol Baskin's name came up a lot, because you were working out for a long time, and I think to speak to that is, these aren't things that you just people call in and you close, some some of them are. Some are easy, they call in, a week later you got under contract, twenty days later it's closed, others you work on, and that's part of like building up your pipeline in this business, is just like any other book of clients, You're calling them and when they're ready to sell, that you wanna be right in front of them and be prepared there. But it turned out fantastic for you, and I'm not trying to make light of this, but it wasn't good for Carol at the end of this, because did she pass away?

Wes Steimel: [14:58] Yeah. The neighbor called me actually two days before we closed on the sale to tell me that they had found her in her apartment. So whether it was health issues or or something else Yeah.

Dan Austin: [15:11] You know, because she was kind of acting like a little odd, right, the whole time. Yeah. To me, and I I we don't know, but it seemed like a pretty indicative of like drug use or some sort of something in that ballpark, which I only bring this up because it's not uncommon again, for a lot of these sellers to be in these weird situations. You just kinda have to

Wes Steimel: [15:29] work through it, and work through

Dan Austin: [15:30] it with them. Hold their hands a little bit, kind of understand that there might be some illogical actions that they take, take a step back, lean back in, take a step back, lean back in,

Wes Steimel: [15:39] and and work with them as as things happen. Yeah. And through the entire process, it was just I made it very clear to her that I wasn't pressing her to do anything, this is to her, It got to the point towards the end where she was really pushing on me to move forward. Right. Like, I'm ready. Let's go. What follow-up had taken months and months and months, and then she called me one day and wanted to close in seven days. Wow. At that point, I had three other flips going or three other properties that had taken private time. So I needed to arrange funding and everything. So reached out to a private lender of mine and we got all that stuff dialed up. We closed in fourteen days from that point. Right, of course. It was the, I'm not ready yet, not ready yet and Right. Like I need to close tomorrow type of situation, which you can Yeah, give us that in

Dan Austin: [16:27] for sure. Any like major, other than what we've talked about, any other major like learning lessons or things you would share with the audience on this one?

Wes Steimel: [16:35] Like I mentioned at the beginning, take anybody that calls you off a direct mail piece seriously, no matter how crazy they sound, don't discount the lead, always follow-up because you never know what's gonna be there, and then stick to your numbers, don't let their situation influence your numbers because the numbers are the numbers. Totally, that's really good advice, definitely don't let other outside factors influence your offer, your number because you know what, all the time, a lot of

Dan Austin: [17:01] time you know what you know, other people are willing to do silly stuff, and you don't want that to happen. Sellers obviously, honestly aren't very informed with the value of their property, so if you're using their number to influence your offer, that's probably a bad idea as well. Just just stick to your guns and know what you know. So, Wes, thank you, I really do appreciate you coming on here, I appreciate you and the scale community man, you're awesome dude, you've been in there a while, and you're definitely adding value to the other folks too, and I know the audience will like this, so if they wanna reach out to you, do have any contact information you wanna put out there, any social handles or anything like that?

Wes Steimel: [17:32] Yeah, Instagram I'm not super active on there, usually if I show up, it's my wife has tagged me, and again, there's probably stuff about our flip stuff and our real estate stuff, but I just get tagged in it. But that's Wes Steimel, like no spaces, Wes Steimel on Instagram and then s t e I m e l. Yep. Yep. You can probably search me on Facebook, but similar situation. If I show up there, any activity, it's usually my wife tagging me. Right on. Well, if you have any questions about Carole Baskin, definitely hit

Dan Austin: [18:04] up Wes or just in general, anything with his business. I know Wes is good guy, he'll be willing to to chat with you, but there's a lot more details to the Carole Baskin story other than her sharing the name of the infamous Carol Baskin from Tiger King, it's Tiger King, right?

Wes Steimel: [18:16] Tiger King. Okay, sounds the word we wanna say it.

Dan Austin: [18:19] Anyhow, okay, thank you all for listening, if you wanna find out more about the scale community and what we're doing in our off market real estate community, go to collectingkeys.com/scale. If you don't think you're ready to jump into that, we also have the instant investor program, which we are now offering, it's just an end to end online course, can listen to, you can watch, and you can learn at your own pace. Also on collectingkeys.com, go check us out. You have questions about those as well, you wanna direct this to me, hit me up on Instagram at investorrandan, or any of the other social platforms you use.

Wes Steimel: [18:52] Thank

Dan Austin: [18:52] you, and see y'all next week.