Jeremy Brandt

This transcript has been edited for better readability: Henry Harrison Podcast — Entrepreneurs, Business & Finance Guest: Jeremy Brandt Henry Harrison Well hello, Jeremy. Thank you very much for being on Entrepreneurs, Business and Finance. Jeremy Brandt Thanks, Henry. Great to be here. Henry Harrison I’m going to give a fairly long introduction for my good friend Jeremy Brandt, because he has done — and is doing — a lot of things. He is the founder of WeBuyHouses.com. He’s an entrepreneur, a lender, an angel investor, and he has a strong focus in real estate technology. He is such an expert that he’s been asked regularly to contribute to major media outlets around the country, including: Fox News CNBC CNN Fox Business NPR USA Today The Wall Street Journal In fact, you had an article or contribution in the Wall Street Journal just a few days ago. And I saved this one for last: Larry King Live. Some people may not even remember Larry King, which tells you how long you’ve been doing this. You also were very involved in Entrepreneurs’ Organization, where we met. You were a member in Dallas, then went on to become president there — I was also president at one time — then you founded the Fort Worth chapter, and later served as chair of the EO Global Governance Committee, which means you were involved at one of the highest levels of the worldwide organization. You’re a busy person with a lot of accomplishments. You’ve also personally invested with me in the past, and we recently celebrated my birthday in your backyard. You’ve got a beautiful home, a nice big pool, and a hot tub big enough that if the weather’s too hot, you can probably cool off in it. So it’s really great to have you on. Let’s kind of go back to the beginning. I’d love to hear how you started out in business, and then how you got started as an entrepreneur. You weren’t originally from Dallas, although now you live in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. How did all that happen? Jeremy Brandt I think I was always an entrepreneur. I grew up in Washington State, and I was homeschooled by my parents. I’m the oldest in a large family — I have six siblings — and I grew up very independent. From a very young age, I was the kid buying things at Costco and selling candy to the neighbors and always looking for little business opportunities. I always had odd jobs during the summer and was always working on different projects. So I think entrepreneurship was always kind of in my blood. Then when my family moved to Texas, I was about 16 years old. I got heavily involved in computers and networking, which was kind of perfect timing. I worked for a computer store and also started doing side work in computer repair and networking. I always knew I was going to be an entrepreneur. The exact opportunity just hadn’t presented itself yet. Then during the dot-com bubble, I got laid off from a company where I had a really good consulting job. I loved the work, I was traveling all over the country, and it seemed like a very good career path — until I got laid off. Looking back, that was one of the best things that ever happened to me, because it forced me onto the entrepreneurial path. A lot of people who have very comfortable salaries can get trapped by what I call golden handcuffs. It becomes hard to follow the entrepreneurial dream because the leap feels too big. For me, getting laid off in 2001 or so was a blessing in disguise because it pushed me to go start something of my own. At first I got involved in real estate. I was flipping houses around DFW and really enjoyed it. It was a good time to be in real estate. Then I started combining my technology background with the real estate business, and the first real business I built beyond house flipping was a lead generation company for real estate investors. We were doing online marketing, SEO, and related things before almost anybody in that space was doing it. We were getting leads from homeowners all over the country who wanted to sell their house to an investor. At the time, I wasn’t going to buy a house in Miami from Dallas, so I would call local investors and say, “We’ve got somebody who wants to sell their house to an investor. If we make the introduction and you buy the house, would you pay us a fee?” And everybody said yes. So pretty quickly, the focus shifted from buying and selling real estate to running an online marketplace for people who wanted to sell their house to a real estate investor or cash buyer. That business became Fast Home Offer, and it’s now around 22 years old. It’s been a great business. We’ve worked with millions of home sellers and tens of thousands of real estate investors across the U.S. and Canada. Then a few years after that, I purchased WeBuyHouses.com, which was already a very well-known brand in the country. That’s really where things began to scale in a much bigger way. Henry Harrison That was also around the time we met. And one thing I think is interesting, and people may miss this otherwise, is that you were kind of on your own at age 16, which is pretty unusual. Your family has always been loving and supportive — I’ve met your parents, your siblings, and I know what a close family you have — but you were still basically making your own way at a very young age. Why don’t you tell that part of the story? Jeremy Brandt Sure. When my family moved to Texas, it wasn’t originally meant to be permanent. They were here for about a year and then planned to move back to Washington, where they had property. During that time, I had gotten a great job at a computer store. I was making pretty good money, I loved what I was doing, and I just felt like I had found something that really clicked for me. So when it was time for my family to move back to Washington, I went to my parents and said, “I want to stay here and keep doing this.” To their credit, they were incredibly supportive. We had some conversations about it, of course, but they trusted me to stay in Texas and continue on that path. I think that was an amazing gift from them. Sometimes the best thing parents can do is support the ambitions of their children when those children are really driven and want to do something a little unconventional. It was definitely unconventional, but it felt like the right path for me. I’ve always been very grateful to them for that. Henry Harrison It really is interesting, because there are many different ways to learn. College is certainly one of them, and in the right circumstances I would encourage people to go, but it’s also true that college is not always the only or best route for every person — especially if it involves a lot of debt and you’re not clear on what you’re going to do with it. There are other ways to learn and become successful, and you’re certainly an example of that. You basically had a real job and a real path at 16. Now let’s talk about WeBuyHouses.com and the broader business you’ve built. Jeremy Brandt Sure. As I mentioned, I started the lead-generation company about 22 years ago. Over time, that business became quite profitable, and I started thinking about what to build next or how to expand. About 13 or 14 years ago, I had the opportunity to purchase WeBuyHouses.com, which was a very well-known company and domain in the real estate investing space. At the time, the company was mostly selling leads to real estate investors, which was similar to what I was already doing, but I felt like it hadn’t really been structured in the best possible way. It took me about five years of chasing down the owners before I was finally able to buy it. The vision I had for WeBuyHouses.com was what I called the anti-franchise. In real estate investing, there are some franchise systems out there, and they’re fine for teaching people how to become investors. But if you’re already an experienced investor, the fees, overhead, and rigid structure can actually hold you back. What those people really wanted was: a strong national brand access to technology national buying power negotiated discounts a network of peers So that’s what we built. WeBuyHouses.com is a large national brand, one of the top couple of names in residential real estate investing in the country. Under that brand, we have locally owned and operated offices all over the U.S. They operate under a brand license, not a strict franchise model. We don’t tightly control every part of how they run their investing business. As long as they are honest, ethical, legal, and treating consumers correctly, we don’t get deep into their P&L, their balance sheet, or the exact details of how they invest. We’re more of a service provider to them. We provide the brand, the infrastructure, the technology, and the support, and we charge fees for those services. That structure has allowed us to build this incredible network of very experienced, successful residential real estate investors who each own exclusive territories in their markets and operate under our brand. And one of the things I love is that once a year we run a big mastermind event with all of our licensees. They come together from all over the country, and they share what’s working. Because they’re not competing against one another — everyone has their own territory — they feel very comfortable sharing marketing strategies, investing techniques, and lessons they’ve learned. That’s become a huge strength of the network. Last time we surveyed the group, I believe the network bought around 3,000 houses nationally in one year. So it’s become a significant force in the industry. Henry Harrison And if someone were a real estate investor who wanted to join that network, is that something they could do through your website? Jeremy Brandt Absolutely. They can go to either WeBuyHouses.com or FastHomeOffer.com, and there are ways there to contact us and learn more. Henry Harrison How did you become such a recognized expert that the Wall Street Journal and national television outlets are calling you, and that you were even on Larry King Live? That’s not something most people ever experience. Jeremy Brandt It’s actually a funny story, and it connects back to EO in a way. When I first started building my lead business, I was reading every entrepreneurial book I could find. One of the books I read was Free PR by Jeff Crilley, who was a local Fox reporter in Dallas at the time. That book explained something very simple: reporters are desperate for good stories and good expert commentary. And often, business owners are in fact experts — they just don’t think of themselves that way. So I started doing exactly what the book said to do. Whenever I saw a story about real estate investing or the housing market, I would call the reporter and offer my perspective. A lot of them said thank you and I never heard from them again. But some followed up, and some ran stories. Once you’ve done that a few times, your name starts to come up when reporters are looking for somebody in that space. The Larry King story is probably the funniest example. I was driving somewhere, listening to satellite radio, and I heard a promo for Larry King Live that said Donald Trump and others would be talking about real estate that night. So I did what I had started doing regularly: I picked up the phone, found the number for CNN in New York, and called. I said, “I know it’s too late for tonight, but I run a company in real estate, and if you ever need somebody to talk about distressed real estate or the market, I’d be happy to help.” The producer thanked me, got my number, and that was that. I forgot about it. Then about a week later, he called me back and said, “We’re doing another show on real estate on Wednesday night. Are you available?” And that’s how I ended up on Larry King Live. That story is also a reminder that the talking heads on television aren’t always selected through some giant and elaborate process. Sometimes they’re just the person who called and had something useful to say. Henry Harrison That’s a terrific story. And to give you some credit, they don’t keep calling you back if you aren’t really an expert. I’ve seen the quotes, and I know you know what you’re talking about. One thing people always like to hear about is the hard part. Sometimes from the outside, it looks like everything was smooth sailing. But everyone I know in entrepreneurship has had times of real stress, uncertainty, and pain. You mentioned the 2008 housing crisis. Is that one of the stories you’d point to? Jeremy Brandt Definitely. And when I talk to people who want to be entrepreneurs, I often say this: if you want a low-stress life, entrepreneurship is probably not the career path you should choose. There are huge advantages to it, of course, but the reality is much harder than what people imagine from the outside. During the 2008 housing crisis, I had one business that I had to shut down completely. Then in the lead-generation business, we lost about 60 to 70 percent of our clients in about 10 months. So we had a multimillion-dollar business, things were going great, and then the housing market crashed. Every day we came into the office and more clients quit. We just started bleeding cash. During that period, I had to make some very hard decisions. I laid everybody off. Eventually it was just me left in the business. I gave up our office space and went back to working out of an extra bedroom in my house. And I had this probably unhealthy entrepreneurial optimism for a while — the kind where you tell yourself the market is about to turn around, things are going to get better soon. But it wasn’t happening, and I was digging the hole deeper. Finally one day I woke up and sat down and said: if this business is going bankrupt anyway, then what are all the things I can do before that happens? I still have the note I wrote that day, listing everything I was going to change. That was the turning point. I gave up the office. I cut costs everywhere. I laid off people early — and laying people off, especially when they’re your friends, is one of the hardest things you can ever do. But sometimes you have to do it earlier so they have more runway to land somewhere else. For about two and a half to three years, I ran an unprofitable business. I was working every day not to make money, but simply to lose less money than the day before. But the positive side of that period was that almost all of our competitors went out of business. Real estate is full of opportunists. When things are good, they rush in. When things get bad, they disappear. We stayed. So when the market came back, we were basically the only meaningful player left doing what we did. For a year and a half or two years, we got all the returning customers before new competition started appearing. It was incredibly stressful, and I’ve had a few moments like that in my career. But you dig deep, push through, and get to the other side. Henry Harrison Well, congratulations for pushing through and for being who you are. Do you also do some speaking on these topics? I know you enjoy podcasting and sharing stories. Does that happen mostly through EO and related groups, or all kinds of settings? Jeremy Brandt It really depends on the setting, but yes, I do enjoy speaking. I like podcasts, I like talking to entrepreneurs, and I think if you’ve been in business a long time, one of the best ways to give back is to share the stories — especially the mistakes and hard lessons — so that others can maybe avoid some of the pain. One of my jokes is that the only time I’ve ever really gone to college is as a speaker, because I never went as a student, but I’ve now spoken at universities and law schools about entrepreneurship and business building. That’s been fun. If I can save someone a couple of years of struggle by sharing a story or perspective, that feels worthwhile. Henry Harrison That’s a great note to leave on. People can follow Jeremy in a lot of ways because he’s out there — whether it’s in the Wall Street Journal, on LinkedIn, on podcasts, or through his businesses. So thank you very much, Jeremy Brandt — and we’ll mention WeBuyHouses.com, which a lot of people already know by name — for coming on. I really appreciate it, and I’ll talk to you soon. Jeremy Brandt Thanks, Henry. Really appreciate it.