Mastering Distressed Property Deals with Logan Fullmer

This is Wake Up to Wealth, a podcast dedicated to helping you change the way you think about wealth. And now, here's your host, Brandon Brittingham.

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Hey, everybody, what is up? We are back with another episode of Wake Up to Wealth. And man, I got to tell you guys, I am so thankful for you guys, for the Wake Up to Wealth tribe.

Back to back, the last episodes, we've hit 100,000 downloads in 24 to 48 hours.

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Thank you for continuing to support the show. Thank you for helping blow this show up.
We really appreciate it.

And I'll continue to do my part and get really cool people that are doing cool like our guests today by you guys supporting us i'm going to continue to bring in people that are just going to pour in value and help you guys become wealthy so with that being said today

i've got a gentleman on here logan fulmer who was introduced to me by somebody that i really trust and somebody that's super close to me travis wells who's also just an absolute fucking stud in the real estate investing game thank you so much for being on the show with us today

no doubt I appreciate you having me. I know you got a lot of heavy hitters, so I love it.
Thank you. So I've paid attention to a lot of your content.
And

for one, if you haven't, you need to go follow this guy online. And you're putting a lot of your deal stories out and things that you're doing, which I think are really, really cool.

But one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show, too, was like, you are taking a completely different strategy to a lot of what's out there.

So for those that don't know you, just kind of tell us who you are and what you do. Okay, Logan Fulmer, 44 years old, married, father of four.

I'm here in San Antonio, Texas, got an office of 25 folks. We do curative title and

distressed property acquisition.

That's the heart of our business.

Now I've got an industrial portfolio and land development and all that stuff, but like our generator where the cash came from, the oldest business, like the nucleus of this whole thing is distressed acquisition.

And about 12 years ago, I was wrapping up a career in the oil field. I didn't know that I was wrapping the career up yet, but I'd been saving and started buying some vacant lots downtown San Antonio.

And the value was low. It hadn't gone up yet.

But I got lucky. And this was in the, I don't know, 2009 and 10, 12 range.
And the economy was still pretty weak, but it was slowly starting to recover.

Well, I was working in the oil field, you know, kind of finding my way through my late 20s, early 30s. And I wanted a little bit more than what I had.

So I started trying to figure out how to real estate invest. And I just, man, house flipping, I'd flipped a couple houses.
It was hard.

You know, you're, it's just a lot of work and you got a lot of risk and stuff can go wrong. And I remember thinking, let me just keep working.
I'm going to buy this land.

Lots downtown were worth five to ten thousand dollars. It was a single family, I mean, seventh largest city in the state, single family lot.

You can build one or two houses on it, utilities, a road, just across the highway from downtown. I thought, well, this has got to be worth something one day.

Dude, this is the best bet so far of my life. I bought a couple dozen lots with all my savings.
And within about 18 months, I started getting offers. I mean, I paid five to 10 grand to pop.

My first offer was for $189,000. It was pure luck.
I mean, I did go all in like an idiot, kind of in a way, but it, man, I got so lucky. It paid off.

So I sold that one and basically recapitalized for most of the investment on all of them.

And now I have all this land for nearly free, a couple hundred grand in my bank account, and I get laid off from the oil field.

I'm like, uh-oh, I'm at this like fork in the road that guys like you and I all come to at one point.

So I didn't go back to oil field, went to real estate. The interesting part is I was just buying land and speculating, got very lucky.

So I realized I was on to something and went back to the east side and said, let me get some more of these lots. I'm knocking on doors again.

There's not much in the way of YouTube or podcasts or like help. I'm just knocking with contracts, trying to get deals, and no one would sell me their stuff for five or 10 grand anymore.

Everyone knew the market had changed. Right about that time, I went to sell a property and this old guy was like,

he was just a pain. He was like, I'm not going to the title company.
I'm not doing this and that. And I'm like, fine, I'll come to your house with a deed.

And I bought property with title insurance all the time and nothing was ever wrong. Well, I go to this guy's house, buy his deed for five grand, record it.

When I go to sell that thing a year later, I bought one ninth.

Now I know why the guy didn't want to go to the title company.

Anyway, I go through this summer process. Right, right, right.

So that summer, I go through this process of calling attorneys, asking them what to do, learning how to buy each person's interest, dealing with judgments and liens.

And I couldn't get title insurance on this, but I aggregate all the interest and I'm giving people 500 or 1,000 bucks for their share because I didn't think it was worth anymore.

And they just didn't either. When it was all done, I had a couple of judgments and liens to deal with, but I'm stealing it for like 25 grand.
I go sell it for $125.

And when that happened, like

There was nothing else that made sense after that except that. Everybody in the real estate space was telling me about the returns on mortgage notes, on mobile homes, house flipping, wholesaling.

And every time someone would tell me a story in my mind, I would kept my mouth closed. I'm just like, no, dude, no way.
So that's how this whole thing got started.

And after that, I thought I'll just do that for the rest of my life.

Yeah. So you kind of highlighted it, but like, kind of what is your...

What is your opinion of like, what is distress acquisition? Like, like, how do you define it? And like, how do you find it?

Basically, you're buying property that can't go through title insurance, and property owners are unwilling to fix incomplete or unapplied for probates. I call them like

abandoned estates, things like that.

You've got missing owners, you've got judgments and liens against owners, you have feuding owners, you have breaks in the title chain, no affidavit of airships, all those things.

The deals that when you're getting ready to wholesale, you have to terminate the deal and you can't close it because of things like that. That's what I want.

So my deals are the ones everybody else cancels. Like I'm rummaging through your trash can for deals.

So that's, so

that's remarkable. So like, how in the hell do you make that work? Like, what do you, because right? Cause a title company, an attorney, a lot of times can tell you, you can't do shit with that.

You're dead in the water. Like, how do you turn that into essentially a deal that you can make work? So that's all they said.
Every time I'd bring this to some attorneys, I'd say, you can't do this.

They had every reason why I couldn't. And in the beginning, I believed them because you look up to attorneys when you're a young, broke, you know, hard worker and they're this professional, you know.

But over time, I got irritated and started reading online about the property code, the estates code, the tax code. Those are the three, the probate code.

Those are the four sets of laws that really affect this kind of real estate the most. And I started trying to find solutions and I started to find them little by little.

But the difference is I was willing to pay the cash and it's not big cash, 500 here, two grand here, immaterial almost. The attorneys weren't looking at the risk.

They were just looking at, is it going to work or not? I'm looking at, well, it's very low risk because I'm giving this guy $500 for a deed and I'm buying it subject to the tax debt.

And then I go sell the dang thing and pay the taxes off at closing when I sell it. Like I'd literally be in a $150,000 deal for five or 10 grand.
And the attorneys kept telling me it won't work.

And I went and did it.

And I had to find attorneys that were willing to listen and do it my way.

So I had to go through about 30 of them. Now I have three that work here in my office.
They do it my way.

But the shocking part is finding them. Yeah, go ahead.

Finding them, we literally spend no money on leads because there's not really good programs to do this. So we use the appraisal district to search for certain terms and titles.

We use the land records to look for lawsuits and judgments. We'll look at certain foreclosures.

And then we'll go into the dockets and look for different pleadings against multiple owners, things like that. So you got to get decent with land records, but you can't buy good data like this.

You have to go get it. You have to go find it.
Got it. And so if you wouldn't mind, give us one or two examples of like,

you know, and you could even tell us your wildest one of,

you know, hey, this was 900 fucking heirs, you know,

there's a cemetery on the property, whatever it is. I'm just, I'm just interested in.

Give us one that was, you know, maybe a home run financially, but it was just an absolute pain in the ass to go through.

As you say, all of these, I'm like, there's that one, there's that one, one, there's that one. I have a 65-air deal that I made a million dollars on a $250,000 spend.

I bought 30 acres with a grave, a family graveyard on it this last summer and did another one five years ago.

I'm probably in a plaintiff, I'm plaintiff in probably about 50 lawsuits with curative title and dispute resolution efforts to clear up these things. That's what that looks like.

But I don't know if you can quite see this. Can you see that?

Yeah, I can. Yeah.

So that's a screen clipping for my CRM.

We just sold this property for $640,944

last week.

Our total spend with paying delinquent taxes, a small remaining mortgage, and owners, we had to pay each of them, and a little bit of legal. We paid $186,000 to them.

So our net profit was $454,000 in 60 days.

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I don't want, I'm cautious about saying those because I don't want people to think every deal makes half a million dollars, it doesn't.

But I'm gonna give you another cool one, and then I'm gonna give you a typical one. We did another one last month.

God, this is a complicated one. Holy cow.

So we stumbled across a property that was an industrial vacant lot, and there was about a $450,000, almost $500,000 delinquent tax bill.

But the interesting part is this thing had been in bankruptcy for 10 or 15 years. It was an old retired developer owner that had companies in three different states.

And the appraisal district value, you said the properties were $250,000, but there's a $450,000, $500,000 tax bill. So most people thought it was underwater.
I've got an industrial portfolio.

I kind of know what that land's land's worth. So we took a little bit better look at it.
We called the guy. And through his attorney, we negotiated to give him $25,000 for his interest.

And we bought it subject to the tax debt. But because he had bankruptcies that had not been done properly, he had judgments and liens against him, all these trust and entity issues, like

an actual trust with an entity problem. We didn't know if we're going to be able to clear title.

So I said, look, the 25 grand we're going to give you, I'm going to give you two grand today and 23,000 in not not less than six months.

At that point, we purchased the interest, went back to the title company and worked through their underwriters with a bunch of issues.

We were able to get title insurance after proving up a bunch of things.

And then we ended up selling it to the neighbor for a million dollars instead of going to the market at 1.3, 1.5, because it could take six months, two years to sell.

We didn't even know if we'd get our money, paid $150,000 in broker fees. So we sold it to the neighbor for a million.
We paid the taxes off at closing. My cash out of pocket was two grand.

And then I had legal bills that came in the next month of maybe 10 grand. Our net was about $450,000 in 18 days on that deal.
Wow. That's crazy.
And how did you find that one?

So, in the different in that one specifically, there were bankruptcies attached to it. And then there was a delinquent tax account that was significant.

Those are both free leads in the land records. You got to spend a weekend to learn how to use a docket search and deed searches.
There you go.

Yeah. So one one of the things you said, and you, I've heard you talk about this online, like, how do you figure this shit out with the title, right?

Because like that is the biggest wall a lot of times when you find a title issue and the attorneys are like, we ain't going to settle this shit.

Everything can be settled. There is always a solve.
At the end of the day, you have to figure out is the juice worth the squeeze?

So you've got to be able to allocate a budget to each of these problems or solutions.

And that's why you have to start with a massive margin because well, you know, I've done deals that have made me a million, two million dollars on like insignificant spends.

Like that's happened more times than I can count.

But there have also been times where I've spent 50 grand and done the deal and broke even and made zero dollars. Now, that's not common.

I've probably done that 20 times over thousands of deals, but we try to protect ourselves every time. So when you start out with something, you find out, okay.

There's multiple owners, which means there's probably a missing probate. That's a problem.

Some of these folks are kind of deadbeats. And one of them got sued by, I don't know, Capital One, and he's got a $40,000 or I don't know, $4,000 judgment against him.

You start to see these problems, and you just have to outline them all and say, how do I solve each one? The creditor, you know, the $4,000 judgment, go offer him 500 bucks to the creditor.

I don't tell them what's attached to real estate. I just tell them I'm a debt buyer and you have eight-year-old debt.
I'll give you 500 bucks for it. Once I buy the debt, I'll self-release it.

Then you've got to go in and do affidavit of airships or probates for these people

to close that break in the title chain. But ultimately, there's a solve for each of these.
Some of them take 18 days. Some of them might take a year, though.
So it's important that I say that.

But until you get to the point where you feel comfortable about it, if you get a really good attorney and tell them, no, keep digging, a lot of them will get there.

You just have to push the hell out of them.

Right. Yeah.
No, that makes sense. So this is obviously extremely complex, but you've mastered this, right?

So

you do events around this. You do some consulting.
You do some coaching. You have an event coming up, if I'm not mistaken.
Tell us a little bit about that. I will.
Thanks for bringing that up.

But before I tell you that, what I will say is when I talk about some of this stuff, it sounds remarkably complex. But I'll tell you, two-thirds of the deals I do are not that complicated.

All they are are multiple owners who don't get along and basically don't care about the property.

And I know that sounds crazy for someone to say they don't care about a vacant, inherited $150,000 house. But, you know, one of my friends here is a a musician.
He loves music. Like it's in his blood.

I'm cool with music, but I don't really care that much.

If you can believe it, people are the same about money. Some people don't care about money at all.
And that's okay because I do. And I'll solve that problem, make a lot of money.

So that's why it's actually more common than you would think to have. three owners who just don't get along and you buy them individually.
That's you do an afdership and that's it.

That's literally it. Pay a little bit of tax and you're done.
That's two-thirds, maybe I bet that's two-thirds of our deals. The ones I'm telling about are the fun, crazy ones.

So, I don't want people to be intimidated.

Dude, I know people that are wholesaling and just start working on some of these, and like six months later, they abandon their business model and go do this.

They're like, oh my God, I'm just going to do the low-hanging fruit instead of the mega-complicated ones. In a couple of years, you'll figure it out and get there.
Like, we've got a $6 million deal.

I just bought or contracted for $2.1 million. I mean, there's smoking deals out there, but you need some time, preserve your capital, get there.
It's okay.

But

yeah, event is a full-day training. The last day in January,

this is not an event where there's eight different speakers and everyone's pitching their own thing. This is all my business partners, and we each take a different segment of the business.

And it's, it's, I'm not going to say it's an event. That's a bad use of the word that I chose.
It is a training. It is a full day training.

It's, I don't know, the same cost as two nights out in the town.

Like, is that two nights in Texas or Miami? Because that's the difference.

Depends on how hard you go out, not Miami.

But a lot of times, people say, Oh my gosh, you know, it's 550 bucks. And I'll say, Look, $550, you're not going to know where it went in a year.

But if you come here and learn how to do one deal or just improve a deal you're doing by 30 grand because you learn how to trade somebody down in your standard line of work, earn that $500 and get your ass over to see me.

100%.

Aside from that, how can people get in touch with you, follow you, get more from you, get more content? If you'll go to loganfulmer.com, I've got a ton of stuff on my website.

Same name goes into the social media platforms. I'm all over those.

So one thing I always ask everybody at the end of the show, and I'm going to ask you, and it's everybody's version of this is different.

We call this show Waking Up to Wealth, and it's because I come from not from money.

And a lot of us have been programmed about money the wrong way. Like you said, I'm one of the ones that does care about money.
And I 100% agree with you. There's people that don't.
And that's okay.

That's their thing. But waking up to wealth, the premise behind the show was to bring people on the show like you that show people different ways to make money and ultimately become wealthy.

So that's why I called it waking up to wealth because I want them to have an awakening to money because a lot of us have been programmed wrong.

So I want to ask you like I ask everybody else, whatever your version is, what does waking up to wealth mean to you?

We don't have enough time to get that deep. But what I will tell you is my dad was a CPA with a drinking problem and he had a hard time keeping a roof over our head.

I got off the bus in middle school while the sheriff was moving our stuff out of our seller finance home after it had been foreclosed onto the yard and we moved in with our neighbor. I didn't,

just like a guy told me not long ago, he goes, I thought you grew up in Highland Park and went to SMU. And I'm like, don't let this nice sweater collar fool you, dude.
That ain't where I came from.

But there was this time when that happened and things like that in my early life, I was like, this cannot happen anymore. I'm not going to let it happen.

And there's this 10 year, 15 year journey through my teens and 20s of trying to become enlightened to it. And I did get sober, did get clean.
That was more important than anything.

And when I started earning,

something changed. I had money in my pocket above what it took to pay my bills.
And I thought, how do I make this money work? When I started to search for that answer, that's when everything changed.

Awesome. Well, listen, I appreciate you coming on, spending time with us today.
I'm going to follow up with you because I really want to learn how you do it.

I would suggest everybody that's paying attention to this, because I see the deals you're posting and, you know, you're willing to go after some of the harder shit that people aren't.

To your point, you said some of the deals are nowhere near as hard as people think.

You just have willing, you're, you were willing to go out and figure it out and find a different strategy, which is what I love about real estate.

There's so many different ways that it can make you wealthy and make you money. So I want to say thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Everybody, check him out, follow him.

If you can attend his event, I would suggest to do it. I'm going to see schedule-wise if I can do it.
And I'm excited to learn more for you, from you.

And I'm greatly appreciative that you spent time with my audience today. Thank you.

I appreciate the invite so much. All right, brother.
Thanks. We're going to wrap it with that.

Everybody, again, I can't thank you guys so much for supporting the show, consistently propelling us to 100,000 100,000 plus episodes. And we'll catch you on the next episode.
And

give my guy Logan a follow. Thank you so much, brother.

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