This is what I'm building...🚀
Hey Income Flippers,
I've been a little quieter than I usually am but there has been a good reason.
I have been working hard on a new project.
You see, I'm leaving Keller Williams Realty after 17 years (sigh).
It's been an amazing ride and I'm forever grateful to Gary, Jay, and the entire Keller Williams family for the knowledge, relationships, and opportunities they have given me.
It was an incredibly hard decision to leave.
If you know me, I have bled Keller Red for a long time.
I have never been with another brokerage and saw myself with them forever.
So why am I leaving?
In this newsletter, in 5 minutes or less, I will cover:
What I'm building
How GRID Plays a Critical Role
I started teasing up the move in December.
By that time, my CAZA Agency had collectively made the final decision to leave.
The truth is, that I noticed and felt a few things that got me to open my eyes for the first time in my life.
This forced me to start asking some bigger questions:
What do I want to build over the next 20 + years?
What is the best way I can accomplish my vision?
Can I accomplish my vision here at KW or is there another way to do it?
What brings me joy?
What does my perfect day look like?
Where do I want to live in the world?
What don't I want to do?
How can I help my people make more money and create additional opportunities for them?
How can I Impact more people?
How can I reduce the friction when starting offices?
These questions led me down a rabbit hole.
It was like a puzzle that I was trying to solve, but I couldn't find the missing piece to complete the puzzle.
Let me give you a little background for context.
I jumped into real estate investing full-time in 2005 with the vision of creating The Income Flip in my life.
(Income Flip = your passive income covers your active expenses)
By 2009 my wife and I were renovating 20+ houses a year, managing 300+ properties and I was playing real estate agent for investors, friends, and family.
Simultaneously, I had launched a little real estate investment meetup as a way to meet new people and talk about the game of real estate investing.
Since that time, CAZA (our real estate agency) has sold 1.1 billion dollars of real estate, and our little investment network (now known as GRID) has grown to 40,000+ people.
A little over a year ago, I made the decision that I was going to expand our CAZA Agency using what I call the Agent Investor Model.
Here it is at a glance:
The Agent Investor Model serves the investor, builder, and developer community.
Why them?
Because they give me energy and I love working with them—they are entrepreneurs like me.
They are also multi-transactional clients which drastically reduces my CAC (cost per client acquisition).
I also wanted a step-by-step model to help others around the country build a predictable business—one that would give them back their time.
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The best part is that GRID serves as our lead generation funnel to get into relationships with our target avatars.
I just had to line up the dominos in a way that created the energy I needed between my sales teams and our investment network.
The model also puts us in the path of real estate deals because we target deep equity sellers.
We launched CAZA Knoxville 8 months ago with this model and they are crushing it!
My goal was to expand offices throughout the country leveraging the KW brokerage platform to help me do it, but I kept running into resistance with the KW franchise model.
That's not to say it can't be done at KW, people are actively doing it and have been for a long time, but there is a lot of friction and I wanted to remove that.
What I discovered in my search was that a new model creates new rules that can change or enhance the game you are playing, and when I saw it, I knew it was the missing puzzle piece I was looking for.
Ok, enough build-up....
Let me introduce you to GAIN—powered by GRID and brokered by eXp.
GAIN stands for the Global Agent Investment Network and yes, our CAZA Agency is moving to eXp where our goal is to open up Agent Investment offices around the country leveraging the eXp platform.
What GAIN allows us to do is build a massive agent network all over the world that can help serve our GRID Investment Community and help us identify real estate entrepreneurs who believe in our mission of helping communities build wealth through real estate.
Check out our new diggs:
One of my biggest concerns when evaluating the eXp platform was not having office space (I need a physical community), but what I soon learned was that there were plenty of affordable options to choose from.
More importantly, our roadmap is to invest in real estate all around the country where we can create "GRID Hubs” with partners where real estate entrepreneurs can gather and thrive.
This model helps me speed up that vision.
So, to summarize...
GRID will continue to serve as our wealth platform focused on helping real estate investors do deals and build wealth.
GAIN / eXp will serve as our sales platform—a brokerage without borders that helps agents build better businesses and create financial independence.
CAZA is our sales expansion model where we have a 50/50 ownership partnership with agents and teams that want to implement our Agent Investor Model.
If you are interested in learning more about any of these opportunities and curious about how they can help take your business to the next level...let's talk.
Always FORWARD,
Rob
