Equistream’s Kent Davis Shares His Expertise at Think Realty San Diego Event
Kent Davis, co-founder of Equistream and longtime pastor and missionary, starts everything out with a bang, including his general session at the Feb. 18, 2017, Think Realty San Diego Group Event. Within five minutes of his introduction, Davis covered stress-related heart attacks, Biblical support for vows of poverty (not there, he says), and the cornerstone of his business: buying “ugly” to turn a pretty profit. “How does ugly become pretty?” he asked. “When it becomes profitable!”
Davis moved like lightning through myriad real estate investing topics, always returning to the importance of finding the right deals for you and making the right decisions about them. He said that there are five big mistakes most investors make and, furthermore, by avoiding these relatively simple mistakes an investor can easily enter the real estate investing space and swiftly become successful.
“In the end, you have to be willing to do the [necessary] work to get a good price on a house,” he said, citing as an example a particularly profitable deal that involved clearing a title. “You have to be willing to do the work to make the deal work,” he said, warning the audience that he does not mean that working more is necessarily the key to success in real estate investing. “If you overpay on an investment and then have to work like crazy to make that investment pay off, you’re in the wrong investment!” he said. However, he added, just because real estate investing can be a part-time wealth-building tool does not mean you can only work “sometimes” on your investment strategies. “You have to commit,” Davis said.
Davis went on to expose in detail the five big mistakes investors make. “So many people follow investment trends instead of common sense,” he said, noting that a common investment strategy like flipping has to be tailored to each specific deal you do. “If you treat a house you bought for $1,300 like a ‘normal’ fix-and-flip, you’re going to lose money,” he warned. The same holds true for expert advice: it only applies to certain scenarios. Davis noted that attempting to follow every expert’s advice regardless of niche is a recipe for disaster. He added that investors also often forget that what they want in a house is not the same thing that everyone wants out of their residence, and failing to remember this usually leads to losses instead of profits.
Davis founded his company, Equistream, in 2006 using equity from his own home. He and his co-founder now buy and sell thousands of properties every month, making the “ugly” pretty many times over in the course of a day. Equistream offers “buy-here-pay-here home-buying programs” to those who could not otherwise own a home. “We do the deals no one else will,” Davis explained. “I’m not in the business traditional real estate professionals are in.”
About the Author
Carole VanSickle Ellis is the host of Real Estate Investing Today, a daily nine-minute investing podcast, and the editor of the Bryan Ellis Investing Letter. Contact her at editor@bryanellis.com or visit www.selfdirectedinvestor.org.
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