2431 - Real Estate Investing Lessons from a Marine Corps Veteran with REI Automated's Keith Gillispie

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0:46Visit podverify.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, Keith Gillespie, just on the road from me over in Melbourne. Keith, you are the founder of REI Automated. You're found on the web at reiautomated.io. Keith, great to have you. Brother, thank you so much for having me. Greatly appreciate it. Yeah, fellow military vet here in the Marine Corps. And in fact, we were stationed in some similar locations. You were over in Kanehoe Bay in Hawaii for a few years, right? Yep, that's right. Man, I really enjoyed it there. Yeah, it's a great plan.

1:28I was over in Pearls. So it's great to have you on the show. Keith, before we get going, talking about your superpowers, I always love hearing what business leaders do for fun or kind of into on the side. I understand you are doing a great service here in the state of Florida. we have an invasive hog species here that is just they're awful and so in Florida they really encourage folks please can you help us take care of that population and I understand that that you've you've you've heeded the call I have I have taken that upon myself you know we moved here my son was uh was five years old when we moved here and this is gonna sound crazy but when he was six i got him a little 22 single shot rifle and we've been going out every year since just having an absolute blast last year was his first year in a tree stand we enjoy going out there and making some making some sausage yeah so just for folks that don't know what is um so you go hog hunting um what what is that experience like i don't know if you grew up deer hunting or whatever yeah yeah i grew up mainly waterfowl hunting so taking out some shotguns and shooting some geese or ducks or whatever um but here you know in florida it's not really a big thing and uh and there's a lot of hogs and everybody hates them and they tear up the ground and just nobody likes them it causes literally more than one billion dollars of uh they're just destroying the the wildlife management areas.

3:09And so there's no bag limit. And I take my son out, we, we drive out to this wildlife management area, we unload our bikes, you know, we like doing things the hard way. So we don't even have like the pedal assist e-bikes or anything is the old fashioned mountain bikes. I've got a trailer behind me. And we go three miles out. And we unload our tree stands, we shimmy up at the tree. And then we sit there and we wait his, we have comms, you know, we look like operators, Like literally we have the cord that goes up and the little thing that goes into our ear so that I can talk to him. Cause if I'm, if I'm talking to him, you know, he's probably about 40 yards away.

3:47He can't hear me unless I yell. So we're whispering to each other in, in our mics and we just wait for the Hawks to come. He's got a single shot 22, which most people would say, you know, that's irresponsible, Keith, you know, like you need a bigger caliber. Well, you know, my son's eight years old, but, but literally he can out shoot most Marines. I'm not even exaggerating if I was to bring him in right now and be like hey son what are your weapon safety rules you know treat never keep no treat every weapon as if reloaded never put a weapon anything you got to touch he would just he knows it and he just yeah it's shot I mean when with the hogs and you you can get them rendered and and you get food out of them or yeah so so I process them myself we take them out you know you I don't I don't know wow okay yeah you don't have to go into the gory details we do it we do it right there yeah we do it right there and then i just bring home the meat man and and we do bacon we do sausage for everything unfortunately these are wild hogs so they're not all fatty they're not all fed corn you know these are like they're eating roots and they're eating grubs and so it's really good healthy meat there's no antibiotics there's no pesticides on any of the stuff that they're eating they're just eating acorns from the oak you know the oak trees and stuff and so they're really lean so you're not going to be getting much bacon or you know i love smoking pork butt um but man there's not enough fat on them i actually have to go yeah i have to go to bj's and get some get some fat to to put with the the meat because they're not fatty enough for sausage it would be like 90 to 10 uh you know 90 protein and 10 % fat, not nearly enough for sausage.

5:29You want it to be about 70, 30. And so I actually have to go, go bring some pork fat or beef fat back from the supermarket and mix it in. Otherwise this, this sausage just comes out like lean hamburger meat. All right. Well, fascinating. I did not wake up expecting to talk about this, but thank you so much, Keith, for the, all the insight on all that. Yeah, just so you know, to our friends here in Florida, they're just, oh God, when they show up in residential areas, people are just like, I mean, they're just, everyone's got photos and video of them just tearing stuff, destroying stuff. So Keith, tell us about REI Automated.

6:13It is an education software and coaching business. It was never actually meant to be commercialized. It was just my own solution to my own problem. I was active duty in the Marines and my kids were getting raised without me. You know, I was going overseas over over eight year period of time. I went to 13 different countries. So needless to say, I was gone all the time. I was coming home and my children didn't know me. My wife had to reintroduce me to my kids after every single trip when I would come back from overseas. And so I needed to make a change. I chose real estate investing to be my my vehicle to financial freedom.

6:49and along the way, I found myself just creating a lot of systems and processes. I only had one hour per day, right? I lived in Hawaii, which is six hours displaced from Eastern Standard Time, so it's 10 a.m. for us now. Well, it's 4 a.m. in Hawaii and so I had to get up at like three in the morning to make calls, which is totally not sustainable. I couldn't make calls before work. I couldn't make calls after work because I'm getting down around like 5.30. I'm getting home around 5.30 or 6 p.m., which is midnight Eastern Standard Time. So can't call after work, can't call during work because my phone's in a secure lockbox.

7:24Well, if I can't call before, can't call after, can't call during, as you know, there's only one time that the government can't tell you what to do, and that's chow. Civilians call it their lunch break, you know. So I had to build my business on my lunch break, and that one hour needed to be so efficient and so effective and so automated that I could have one hour of inputs that resulted in eight hours of outputs, eight hours of results as if I had, you know, a full workday of productivity so that I could make really, I was just trying to shoot for about$120 ,000,$150 ,000 net take home. That would totally replace my W-2 income from the Marines and allow me to come home to my wife and kids.

8:06and it took me about four years to get up to that. But at that time, we had so much systemized that we made a little over$300 ,000 just on the real estate side. And so I was able to get out of the Marines in 2020 and been doing it full-time ever since. And we didn't really commercialize that until 2021. It was 2021, my mentor found out what we were doing and he's like, man, this has been absolutely transformational for you and your personal life. You could be helping so many other people if you offered it as a service. And so, you know, it started just as a software company, just as a CRM, and then turned into an education company as well, where we have courses about marketing and deal structure and deal analysis and raising private money and all the things that you need to be successful at as a real estate investor.

8:55So now we had, you know, the education. We also had the system or the software component of it. And then people still weren't successful enough. Who am I to judge? But that's how I felt. And after interviewing a little over 100 of our clients, I realized these people are just getting in their own head. They're getting in their own way. It's almost self-sabotaging. They're not giving themselves permission to go out and do the scary things. And so then we added a coaching element as well as support element to help these people get faster success, make more money, less time, less effort. So education, software, and coaching is really what we do.

9:28Well, Keith, there are a lot of real estate, quote-unquote, experts out there. There's a lot of free information. You got AI, you've got, you know, tons of tools that are on the market. How do you find your niche in this space? You know, I'm kind of known as the systems engineer. Most engineers have made a little bit of a bad rap for themselves where they get stuck in analysis paralysis and they kind of have the mentality. A lot of Marines actually turn out to be really good engineer-minded people because we're ingrained, like the devil's in the details. How you do anything is how you do everything.

10:05If you're going to do it, you better do it right type of mentality. So a lot of people, they get wound up and they never actually do the thing. They're always prepping for the thing. They're always planning for the thing, but they fail with the execution. Where my brain is pretty equally split, I'm really exceptional. My superpower is creating bulletproof systems that can be replicated and duplicated across the board. I've done deals in 34 states. I mean, what I do really can be done by anybody. I wholesale, I wholetail, I retail, I wrap, I do rentals, I do novations, I do lease options. I do all the things that you can do in single family residential real estate.

10:43And I've done it across 34 states. And it's not even me who's done it. It's my team of$5 per hour virtual assistants that live in the Philippines or Africa or Egypt. And so really, when I say it can be done by anybody, you don't have to be a high level salesman. You don't have to be amazing at structuring deals or amazing at raising private money or whatever it is. You just have to follow the process. Kind of like, you know, we have rules or laws in the Marine Corps. And one of them is instant and willing obedience to all lawful orders. Right. That's one of our our laws, instant and willing obedience to all lawful orders.

11:17And I took that principle and I applied it in the business space. So you really don't have to do too much critical thinking. You just have to follow the process. The process has been done hundreds of times. It's been verified. It's been streamlined. And so I'm not just teaching you what to do. I'm telling you why. I'm telling you how we've done it in the past and then saying, now, if you can find a better way to do it, please update the SOP. You know, so we're constantly refining. Yeah. Yeah. And so here we are in the middle of 2026. What opportunities are you seeing on your radar right now? Or are there regions of the country where you're like, yeah, listen, if you're an investor, might not want to be looking at these kind of deals, but boy, you definitely want to be looking at this.

12:07What are you really liking right now? Yeah, there's several. Man, I was literally at a coaching conference in Orlando last week with 128 other real estate investing coaches. So everybody comes from all over the nation. We're all teaching real estate investing. Honestly, we're all kind of competitors, but it's a really good, cool, cohesive, friendly environment here. And really across the board, all of us have our own real estate investing business as well. Most of us, I would say, I've been in the game for 10 years. I would say that's kind of the average. Maybe we have some people at five, we have some people at 20.

12:45But most everybody has been in for 10 years or longer. Everybody's kind of got kicked in the balls the last 24 months. It's been a rough market. Starting in 2024, the market started to cool down quite a bit. Even in Q3, Q4 of 2023, it started to cool down. 2024, rough year. 2025, rough year. 2026, maybe we're starting to see a little bit of an incline in the market. So here's what I'll tell you. And there's a lot of legislation coming down the pipe all over the United States, all over a bunch of different states when it comes to wholesaling or assignments. And so that's been really difficult to navigate.

13:24I feel like every time I change my underwear, there's a new law. Like literally every week, there's some new legislation in some state that has to do with wholesaling, double close assignments, transactional closing, whatever. and it's difficult to keep up with that so we've kind of switched gears in my own personal business we've kind of switched gears from instead of doing all of this short-term stuff with wholesaling and rehabs well i see rehabs as kind of being quite a bit riskier right now because in many markets it's declining so i don't want to flip a house putting a bunch of money trying to force appreciation up when i know that the market is falling florida in particular has gotten absolutely hammered the last eight 16 months and so i don't think that right now we're in a good wholesale environment i don't think right now we're in a good retail environment instead what i would encourage people to do is if you want to do a short-term thing novations are the way but really if uh if you don't have to you know extinguish the asset if you can hold on to the asset as a rental right here right now is absolutely the best rental market we've had like meaning to acquire rentals is the best market rental market that we've had since 2016 when I got started.

14:35And, and that's my biggest regret. Frankly, Josh was the first eight years of my real estate investing career. I sold everything. I wholesaled it. I did innovation. I wrapped it. I didn't hold onto one single asset. It wasn't until 2020, December of 2023, three, did I start holding on to anything? And man, I so wish that I had, I was just greedy, you know, I was young and I wanted a whole bunch of money. It's exciting. Yeah. You're doing the greenhouses, a red motel. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I hear you. And I wish I hadn't, I wish I had kept one and two, one and two, uh, one and three, one and four, something like that.

15:17Yeah. Well, there are, again, like I said, there's a lot of noise out there. Um, and so I just want to make sure that the, you know, the right kind of folks are kind of checking you out. REIautomated.io, who is a really kind of ideal person that you love working with and you can likely do some great work together? What I, who I really am geared to is my old self, frankly, like, like anybody who's not my old me is not going to like it. So I'll turn you away if you're not a high earning W-2 employee that is really strapped for time. If I could just put it in one sentence, I'm making about$120 ,000 per year net take home in my W-2 and I have a wife and two kids and I'm constantly gone in other countries.

16:10Now, most people, they're not constantly gone in other countries active duty in the Marines, but are they strapped for time in their W-2? Do they also have a family? Do they only have a couple of hours to work their real estate investing business? They have the golden handcuffs. They're strapped to their desk or their W-2 job. They want some freedom. They want some time freedom. They want some financial freedom. They want some choice freedom. That's who I'm going for. And really specifically, let me even refine this down a little bit further. I only do residential houses. So as soon as we get into multifamily, five units and up, I don't really do that.

16:45As soon as we get into commercial, you know, strip malls or storage units or anything like that, I don't do that either. Just one to four units, single family, residential real estate. That's my bread and butter. That's what I teach. Yeah. Keith Gillespie, REI automated.io. When someone goes to the website, what should they click on? What should they do? Oh, watch the video. So, you know, I have a, if anybody is interested, go ahead and, you know, go stalk me on Facebook or peruse the website. But we have a 55-minute video that literally explains the entire thing. Everything that we have to offer in the education, everything that we have to offer in the software, and everything that we have to offer when it comes to support and coaching.

17:34And we have some shorter videos, of course, like a 20, 22-minute video just going over the software. But if you want to see the whole thing, it's up on YouTube as well. But you should watch that. It's a 55-minute video that goes over every single thing that we have in the business to help you get. And we're really here to help you get your first 50 deals. If you are less than your first 50 deals, we can absolutely help you. And we have a 99.3 % success rate. We've had more than 570 people come through. Only four people have ever asked for their money back. We are the best. We are the best of the best in the nation when it comes to getting you success.

18:13Excellent. All right, Keith Gillespie, reiautomated.io. Keith, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much, Josh. Greatly appreciate it.

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