Meet Shawn Kostoff, a busy special education teacher and family man from Wilmington, Delaware, who began investing in real estate part-time in 2014 with a goal of earning financial freedom for his family.
In today’s member spotlight, we’ll share how Shawn overcame the obstacles in scaling his business while maintaining his full-time teaching career, as well as how he leveraged REIComplete’s Done-For-You Services to help him grow his deal flow from 1 deal a year to 8 deals in his first six months as an REIComplete member.
Shawn started building his part-time real estate investing business in 2014 after reading Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad. Even though Shawn has always been passionate about his career as a teacher, he knew it wouldn’t provide him with the financial independence he desired.
After several months of learning the ins and outs of wholesaling, Shawn found his first seller and later found his first buyer in an unlikely place – on the basketball court. Shawn earned $10,000 on that first wholesale deal.
“That set me on the path. I realized ‘wholesaling works.’ I just needed to figure out how to make it work for me.” Shawn shared about his first deal.
In 2016, shortly after closing his first deal, Shawn’s real estate investing business took a backseat for a little while thanks to many new “firsts” in his life. This was the year that Shawn got married to his wife who’s also a teacher, before moving to Delaware where they both took new teaching positions at a charter school. They bought their first house together that year— a ‘fixer-upper’ that Shawn and his wife renovated themselves. And the following year, they welcomed their first child together, a son.
Needless to say, 2016 was a busy year for Shawn.
But even though Shawn’s business took a back seat for a little over a year, real estate investing always remained top of mind. So, when things began settling back down for Shawn in late 2017, he decided it was time to fire up his wholesaling business again.
With a growing family at home and a full-time teaching career, Shawn shared that his business just “sputtered along.” He barely had time after school and on the weekends for marketing, never-the-less, following-up consistently with sellers. This resulted in Shawn closing zero deals in that first year of returning to business.
Looking for a solution, Shawn attended a training event in 2018 where he learned about REIComplete’s Done-For-You Services. It was during this event that Shawn came to the firm realization that if he wanted to scale his business and maintain his teaching career at the same time, he needed to delegate his marketing and lead generation tasks so he could focus solely on talking to motivated sellers.
While Shawn saw an answer in our Done-For-You Services, he had trouble overcoming the cost challenge when it came to contracting out his marketing, lead generation, and follow-up.
For the first four years of his business, Shawn had done everything on his own. And while this kept Shawn’s out of pocket costs down, it prevented him from scaling beyond 1-2 deals a year.
Despite Shawn’s concerns about the cost of our Done-For-You Services, he still wanted to see if we could be the game changing solution for him. So, he booked a call with one of our lead sales coaches, Julia Jordan, who helped him map out the ROI he could make if our services helped him close one deal a month. After running through the numbers with Julia, Shawn was convinced.
Shawn shared that joining REIComplete in the middle of 2018 was one of the best decisions he ever made. Suddenly he had qualified seller leads and appointments coming in regularly, and all he had to do was make the calls, go on appointments, and close deals.
In Shawn’s first six months as a REIComplete Member, he closed 8 deals and has gone on to consistently close 1-2 deals a month ever since.
“I had the leads coming in. I had everything I needed. It was a matter of doing it at that point. And since my money was on the line every month, I had that built-in accountability of consistently talking to sellers and closing deals. And of course, making a profit was great.” Shawn Kostoff shared.
We asked Shawn what’s his favorite thing about our Done-For-You Services is, and here’s what he had to say:
“It works. Your Managed Services have been a saving grace for my business. I love how hands-off the day-to-day aspect of it is. I don’t have to worry about the backend stuff or pulling lists. I don’t have to worry about mailing postcards or letters. I don’t have to worry about technology or the software part of it. REIComplete’s Done-For-You Services allows me to do the important stuff. The stuff that I actually want to do. I want to talk to motivated sellers and close deals. That was the biggest thing holding me back before. Now it’s game on!” —Shawn Kostoff (REIComplete Member Since 2018)
Shawn also added that while REIComplete holds quarterly member success calls with every Done-For-You member to review numbers, he recommends that members take advantage of REIComplete’s in-house coaches more often than that.
Shawn regularly schedules calls with REIComplete member success coach Darren Wassell to get advice, since Darren’s a real estate investor himself.
We want to thank Shawn for taking the time to share his story with us and for allowing us to put him in the spotlight today.
At REIComplete, we’re committed to helping solve the problems that hold real estate investors back from growing and scaling their businesses.
We offer a completely done-for-you marketing and lead generation service that comes complete with all of the systems, technologies, and VA staff you need to find, work, and qualify leads. The end result is much like Shawn’s; you only talk to qualified prospects who want to sell their properties. We do the rest.
If you’re ready to start scaling your real estate business this year, we’d love to have a conversation.
