ShortSaleWealth.com

Who is Shaun McCloskey?

Shaun McCloskey is the owner of Property Match, LLC (the entity in which investment properties are purchased and sold ) and Property Match Realty, LLC.  Property Match Realty is a licensed real estate brokerage in the state of Missouri and is the home for 14 other investors that see the benefit of being a real estate agent/investor.  Shaun’s wife, Jennie, is the broker.  Shaun has also recently been asked to devise a short sale course designed specifically for real estate agents that will be part of the St. Louis Association of Realtors required Continuing Education courses.

Shaun has closed over 200 real estate deals using the following methods:

• Short Sales
• Rental property/Landlording
• Simultaneous closings
• Lease option buying
• Lease option selling
• Sandwich lease option
• Subject to acquisition
• Subject to selling
• Note buying
• Assignments
• Wholesaling
• Rehabbing
• Vacant properties
• Foreclosure Properties (REO)
• Pre-Foreclosure Properties
• Discounting
• Wrap Mortgages
• Owner Financing (buying)
• Owner Financing (selling)
• Forbearance Agreements
• Land Trusts
• Real Estate Agency Representation

Approximately 70% of Shaun’s real estate deals are acquired through short sale transactions.

Associations:

• Missouri Real Estate License
• Missouri Notary Public
• Member of St. Louis Association of Realtors
• Member of St. Charles Association of Realtors
• Member of Missouri Association of Realtors
• Member of National Association of Realtors
• Member of the St. Louis Regional (MLS)
• Member of the St. Louis Real Estate Investment Club (REIA)
• Member of the WIN (Wealth Improvement Network) - Real Estate Investment Club
• Member of the STREET, LLC - Real Estate Investment Club
• Member of AOPA - Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association

Shaun’s Story 

I first became interested in real estate around 2001.

At the time I was working for Pagenet, the largest pager (beeper) company in the world as an account rep.  It was my job to sell pagers and monthly service to other small businesses that would then resell our product.

One of my regular business clients at the time was a gentleman named Tony Russo.  For whatever reason, it just so happened we developed a friendship during the course of our business together. 

I admired Tony for his not only his ability to make just about anything he touched turn to gold, but also for his ability to really help everyone he came in contact with. It seemed almost effortless to him, and almost every time I came to his office, one more person would be in his office thanking him for his help.

It’s funny how in retrospect I can see that even though I was really impressed by Tony’s helping people, I never bothered to actually ask him what it was that he was doing to help them. I was young, probably a little self centered, and mostly there to make a sale and then move on to the next guy.

It all changed the day I saw $28,000 sitting out on Tony’s desk…

I walked into his office, and sitting atop a bunch of paperwork on his desk was a check.  Curious me, I decided to peek at it, since it was sitting out.  I wasn’t all that surprised to find it made out to Tony. But I nearly choked when I saw it was for a cool $28,000.00.

I had no idea what the check was for.  But suddenly I found myself motivated beyond belief to understand what this guy really did to get a payday like that.  So this time, I didn’t hesitate.

“Tony, I’m sorry to ask questions about your personal business, but I just have to know…

…how is it that you have a check sitting here for 28 grand?  Did you sell your business or something?

Even though I was interested in how he made the money, I was frankly also a little worried that if he had just sold his business and I was going to lose a big client!

Tony: “Nah, I just sold a piece of investment property.”

Me: “Was it a fixer upper that you rehabbed and then sold like those T.V. shows?”

Tony: “Nope.”

Me: “Oh. Are you a real estate agent?”

Tony: “Nope.”

Me: “So you inherited it then?”

Tony: “Nope.”

Now I was really curious!

Me: “Well, how long ago did you buy it?”

Tony: “I never actually had to buy it, Shaun…”

Me (interrupting excitedly): “Wait a minute… you didn’t fix it up and then sell it, you’re not a licensed real estate agent, and now you’re telling me that you never even owned it? And you made $28,000 on it?”

I had now gone from curious to totally confused.

Tony calmly responded, “Shaun, you’re not listening, I never said that I never owned the property. I said that I never had to buy it.”

Tony always had a way with words.

“So wait a second… you didn’t have to come up with any money, but somehow you must have owned the property to be able to sell it, right?” I asked. By this point I was questioning whether or not Tony was doing something illegal.  “Exactly how long did you OWN this property for, Tony?”

Tony: “Oh, I probably owned this property for a grand total of 30 seconds or so.”

Now, I never knew Tony to lie about anything, but honestly, I thought he was pulling my leg. I only had one question left, and this one I just knew would make me understand everything.

“Ok, then, tell me this. How much time do you have vested in this little transaction of yours? It had to have taken you forever to pull that one off, right?”

“Nope.”  I’ll never forget the smile on Tony’s face, as he continued, “I have a total of about 7 or 8 total hours of time vested in this whole deal, Shaun.”

What?!?!?!? I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. My next thought didn’t even have time to get filtered before I just blurted it out.

“Wow, you must have really screwed somebody over pretty badly, huh?”

I said, and was suddenly struck by how offensive I must have just sounded.

“Shaun, did you see the lady that just hugged me and left the office with a huge smile on her face as you were walking in here?”

“Sure,” I said.

“She used to own the house that I just made all that money on, and she came by to personally thank me for getting rid of this problem for her when no one else could. She talked to every real estate agent in St. Louis, and no one could help her. But I did, Shaun, and for that she is thankful.”

I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. And to be honest, I still didn’t fully comprehend what Tony had just told me.

I was trying to take in the fact that Tony had just made in a few hours what I made in almost a year.  And on top of that, the lady actually thanked him for getting rid of her problem!  And it had been more than just a typically polite thank you. This lady had hugged Tony to the point where I thought that she was his sister or a long lost cousin, or something!

What the heck did Tony do here?  And how come I don’t know anything about this???

It was truly a defining moment for me…

You see, one of the biggest benefits of working at Pagenet was that they spent a lot of money on sales training, and at that point in my career I had attended almost every sales training program in the book. 

I thought I had heard it all, but now I was seeing something completely different. Tony had been able to get everything he wanted by doing one simple thing - he gave her everything she wanted FIRST.

It was that day that I decided that I would no longer be a part of any trade unless I could experience that same type of hug as a result of me helping the other person.

Soon after, I began taking Tony to lunch on a regular basis. I was picking his brain at every opportunity that I could think of, but differently this time.

Now I was thinking, “How can I set this up so that not only can I ask Tony questions about his real estate endeavors, but where Tony gets something out of this too? As a matter of fact, how can I get him what he wants first?”

Needless to say, I started paying for as many of the lunches as I could afford.  

For quite a while after that, Tony and I would get together for lunch every few weeks. I would ask question after question, and Tony would always answer every one. In the beginning, I think I only truly understood about 50% of what he was telling me, but I was learning, and learning a lot every time we spent time together.

Pretty soon, another year had gone by, and I had heard story after story about the deals that Tony had put together. Each story was better than the last, and each story ended with the person on the other end being so happy that Tony was able to get them out of yet another weird situation.

My problem at this point was that even though I now had a pretty good idea how to help other people in the same way as Tony, I never took any actions towards it. I can only sum the reasoning for this up in one short statement:

…I Wasn’t Motivated Enough.

The truth is that I had a really good job. I was actually getting paid a pretty decent living for my age. My boss worked out of our Chicago office, which meant I didn’t have anyone locally looking over my shoulder all the time.

As a result, I figured out how to do my full time job in less than 30 hours a week. I had a ton of free time. I had a lot of freedom, and bottom line, I wasn’t about to give up all of the comfort that came with the life I was living, and the job I was fortunate enough to have.

And then came the fall of the pager industry. Cell phones had become so affordable that there was no longer a need for pagers, and before I knew it, I got a dreaded phone call from my boss in Chicago.

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but your position has been terminated.  Shaun, Your last day with the company will be this Friday,  and as a thank you for all of your dedication to this company over the past 7 years, we are providing you with 30 days of paid severance on your last day.”

30 days of severance for 7 years worth of work with the company? I had worked my butt off for this place! I had built a system for this company that really worked! My sales team was always ranked in the top 3% of the company each and every month, most months we were #1 in the company, and they were saying thank you with 30 days severance?

I couldn’t believe it.  I was absolutely humiliated.

I was terrified of what was to come next. And most of all, I felt like I had really been taken advantage of.

So I made another decision: I would never work for another company again. I decided that I would be in control of my own destiny from here on out, and that no one would ever be able to tell me that I’m out of a job again! It was then that it all became clear to me.

NOW I was motivated enough!

I decided that real estate was where it was at, just like Tony had been teaching me for so long. Only this time, I took ACTION.

I didn’t just hear all of the good stories and then not do anything about it. I couldn’t - I didn’t have any money saved up at all. I had to make some money and I had to make it very quickly in order to sustain the lifestyle that I had been accustomed to.

So I went out and bought my first piece of investment property for $255,000. It only needed paint and carpet, and then I could sell it easily for $300,000.00. I figured if I put $10,000 into it, it would look brand new, and then I could sell it very quickly and put about 35 grand in my pocket in probably less than 45 days!

Now we’re talking! Plus I would be helping out the person that was in need of selling it, and I would be helping to provide work for my contractors, which would in turn put food on their family’s tables. The new family moving into the house would get a very well fixed up, nice house to live in. Everyone would win - just like Tony had been doing with his deals.

There was just a couple of minor problems.

First, the repairs were much more than I thought they would be. They ended up being $20,000, not the $10,000 that I thought they would be.

Second of all, it took four months just get the work done.

Then, on top of that, since I thought it would sell so fast, I didn’t take into consideration the fact that there would be a payment to the bank due of $2,100 per month. So every month it sat there, it was costing me more money in payments, taxes, insurance, utility bills, etc… I didn’t think about these things when I bought the property though. I was just excited to do my first deal.

Finally, the house was finished! I put the house on the market for $299,900.00 and I was sure it would sell quickly. The first week we must have had 50 people walk through the house, all of whom said that they really liked it, none of who were ready to write a contract. 30 days went by and another house payment and still nothing. Then 60 days went by, and 90 days. At this point, I had lowered the price on the house to 279K and still, no takers.

The house wouldn’t sell no matter what I did.

I’m sure you can imagine that I started to panic at this point. I was completely out of money. My bills were starting to be paid late, and I was now turning into that motivated seller that I had heard so much about. I would have done anything to get rid of that place, so I decided to offer it up for rent. Anything to try to at least get the house payment covered. And finally, after two more months I found a tenant.

In order to rent to this person, I was going to have to rent out the property for about $2,100 per month, but that barely covered my payment to the first mortgage that I had on the property. That didn’t cover the additional interest on the loan that I had borrowed from a friend to do the repairs. It didn’t cover the taxes and the insurance on the building.

The bottom line is that it ended up costing me almost $600 more than that every month JUST TO BREAK EVEN!! But I took it. I didn’t know what else to do. The guy moved in about 30 days later, and I finally had some debt relief. Now, it was only costing me $600 per month to hold on to this property that I now hated instead of the $2700 per month that it was costing me before.

I learned a big lesson on that first deal. I learned that helping other people is the name of the game in this business, as long as you don’t drown in the meantime. It doesn’t do you any good to help people one time. You have to be able to do it over and over again, like a system, and that system could not involve me losing sleep wondering how I was going to eat the next day.

After that first deal, I pieced myself together just barely enough to try another one. It was a little different situation and I have to say that it worked out much better. I made about $13,000 on that deal. It was a much lower priced property, which meant that there was a lot less risk if something went wrong. (To give you an idea, I bought it for $15,000.) This was a little bit more rewarding, but rehabbing, in my opinion was still a lot of work.

I still own that property today, and I still lose money on it every month.

For a long time, I thought my goal should be to make a boatload of money early on in life, buy all the things that I wanted whenever I wanted them, and just have a lot of fun. But the truth is that it’s WAY more fun to have all the things that you want in life only when you got them by giving other people what they wanted first! When my head hits the pillow each night, I fall right to sleep knowing that everything I do makes a difference.

Then I learned SHORT SALES!!!

My first short sale deal was pretty unbelievable.  I met a guy that was behind on payments, didn’t want to ruin his credit, and was willing to do whatever it took to stop from having a foreclosure on his record.  He literally signed over the deed to his house on the first appointment. 

I’ll never forget when I got that first deal approved by the bank!  I had heard that this stuff worked for so long, but the reality is that I always thought that this kind of thing only worked for “other people.”  (ever feel like that?) 

I made a little over $12,000 on my first short sale deal.  

Since then, short sales has been the focus of my real estate business.  I just couldn’t find any other aspect of real estate that I could make so much money with so little vested.  Since that first deal, I’ve never looked back.

Next thing you know, a couple of years after my first short sale deal, I had become known around St. Louis as the go-to guy for short sales and was asked to teach what I know to a local real estate investor club. I spoke to almost 200 people that night, and to be honest, I was as nervous as you can imagine. And then I realized something…

You can not be both nervous, and help other people to your fullest extent at the same time.

If you’re nervous, that means you’re focusing only on what other people might think of you.  You’re not truly thinking about how to help the other person as best as possible.

After that, I was no longer nervous and just stuck to helping every person in that room.

Since then, I have had the absolute pleasure of training people all over the country to create financial abundance in real estate short sales all while helping other people in need, all without needing money or credit.

Now it’s your turn…

Now it’s time for you to eliminate all of your fears and concerns about why making money hasn’t been working for you yet. If you don’t have everything you want both personally and financially, it’s because of one thing only - you haven’t mastered how to do it while helping other people get what they want first. 

When you live your life putting others needs first, you will ALWAYS get what you want. 

That’s reality.  That’s life.

I invite you, if you dare, to explore the exciting education I have to offer you.  I’ve walked down this road, and the really great news is, I made you a map.  All you have to do is let me show you where to go, and you’ll find yourself walking in my footsteps, but with one major difference - it should take you far less time and effort than it did me!

The rewards are more than you ever thought possible!

Take care, and remember… GIVE FIRST.

Shaun McCloskey