Meet Paul Argueta of REH Real Estate in Pasadena

Today we’d like to introduce you to Paul Argueta.

Paul, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I got my real estate license when I was 18 years old. I just celebrated my 43rd birthday so I have been in the real estate industry for 25 years now.

I worked my way through college at UCLA as an agent. I would go to school in the morning until 1 pm and would work as an agent from 3 pm until about 7 pm M-F and on the weekends.

When I was 19, I attended a seminar on buying bad debt for pennies on the dollar. I had just gotten an Amex with a 5K limit and I used it all to buy bad Whirlpool Credit Card debt. Essentially I became a collector, and I learned how to skip trace and hunt people down using white pages, 411, credit reports, title searches, etc. I would then negotiate with them and offer them settlement agreements in exchange for discounted payments on their balance. I turned that 5K into 7.5K. I bought another pool of bad loans but wasn’t as successful the second time. I shut the operation down. Years later, I would use these “skip tracing” skills to find and connect with people who I deemed likely clientele.

When I was 20, I joined a network marketing company. It was a pyramid scheme that offered “discounts” on phone, gas, & electric. I was the young guy in the front of the hotel room selling the dream to the audience, and I did it confidently, despite being broke. I vividly remember driving around town in a Mercedes Benz convertible with no money for gas. I eventually hit what was the top position in the company at the time and unfortunately, had a disagreement with the owners. I worked for six months without getting paid while the owners and I settled our differences. I continued to sign up new representatives and new customers. I thought they would appreciate this level of dedication-especially since I wasn’t being compensated for it. They didn’t. My distributorship was terminated. I built a team of 3000 people globally who had invested $499 to start their own home-based business. Years later, I would use this skill of recruiting & building to build my organization.

When I was 24, I returned to real estate full time. I missed the boom between 1999-2004, and by 2005, I heard rumblings of a market collapse. I attended a real estate conference in Palm Springs, CA, that instructed agents on how to sell REO/Foreclosure properties for the Banks & financial institutions. I was hooked and became one of the largest REO Agents in Los Angeles County between 2006-2011. I would use the revenue earned during this period to start my own company.

When I was 31, I started Real Estate Heaven and took EVERYTHING that I had learned from my previous experiences and started a boutique brokerage. We have been featured in Inc Magazine on their prestigious Inc 5000 list twice for growth that exceeded 400%. My experience has taught me that the only constant in our profession is that there is no constant and businesses are forced to either adapt or die. Five years ago, I began exploring SEO and Digital Marketing. I refused to believe that the only way for me to benefit from the internet was by buying leads from Zillow and other real estate web titans. I would work as the Broker for REH during the day and would study Internet Marketing late at night after my family was asleep. I invested thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars into mastering the web so that not only my agents could benefit from it, but so that my clients could benefit from it as well.

Has it been a smooth road?
Entrepreneurship is not a straight line, and it is especially not easy when you are married with five children. There have been many nights where I had considered throwing in the towel and quitting. I learned that in order to succeed in business, I had to learn how to control my own thoughts. The more disciplined I was in my thoughts, the better I executed my ideas, which ultimately, did not always guarantee success. In fact, many, perhaps most, of my ideas failed, but some worked, and the ones that did work, still make up a large portion of our gross revenue to this day.

For instance…

A real estate brokerage needs agents-otherwise, why have a brokerage? In many cases, you can be more successful working under a broker than you can owning a brokerage. We got the bright idea of starting a real estate school as a way to grow the brokerage, ie, recruit from the minor leagues.

Here’s where we messed up.

1) While 97% of our students graduate, only 20-30% of them actually pay and take the state exam to be eligible to work. This is very similar to a gym membership. Many people want to look fit but won’t commit to going five days a week. This meant that the tidal wave of licensed agents that we anticipated coming from our school didn’t happen.

2) Because we thought we were going to get a flood of newly licensed agents, we treated the school as a loss leader and offered our courses at prices far below everyone else and sold them on Groupon which meant we had to share 50% of the revenue with them and then wait 60-90 days to get paid! After we did the math, each student was actually COSTING us about 99 dollars. Imagine?! Owning a school where YOU PAY students to attend. Yep. That is what happened for the first year and a half.

We were striking out royally. First, we weren’t getting the agents we needed. Second, we were losing $99 for every student that enrolled. Double whammy.

Then. I. Learned. About. SEO.

My thirst for knowledge of internet marketing was insatiable. I paid for courses like nobodies business. Some were trash and a few were like diamonds that I probably should have paid more for. I learned how to generate ORGANIC traffic on the web for the school. Don’t believe me? Google the phrase “Best Real Estate School in Los Angeles”. You can even substitute school with classes. We show up on the first page without spending a dime in pay per click advertising. Depending on your geolocation, we may or may not show up on the Google Maps results, but just beneath that we are usually under Yelp. That’s right, we rank just beneath a publicly-traded company that is worth billion(s)? Not bad eh?

We went from holding an asset that nearly bankrupts a company, to an asset that saved it. These days we enroll about 30 students a month and offer live classes on weeknights, weekdays, and weekends!

So, as you know, we’re impressed with REH Real Estate – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
We aren’t small anymore, and we aren’t as big as some of the well funded real estate brokerages that pay agents huge signing bonuses to recruit them.

We are in the middle. We are small enough to get our agents the attention they need to thrive and big enough to get them the attention and web traffic they need to get clients.

We offer our agents 100% commission, AMAZING training on REAL WORLD marketing and techniques that work today-not ten years ago, we give our agents access to our back-end web design & coding team, and we provide leads.

If we had to pick ONE thing that we should be known for is for Internet Marketing. We eat, sleep, and breath internet marketing. We know how to generate immediate paid traffic for a real estate agent while we build organic free traffic that can and will eventually match or surpass the pay per click traffic. The biggest reason most, if not all businesses fail, is because they didn’t have enough clients. It doesn’t matter what the profession is. We know how to get clients.

Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
We love Pasadena. It is a melting pot of culture, history, and fun. I least like the parking tickets although the ability to now pay with your phone on their Passport app makes it a little more palatable.

Pricing:

• $549 Live Real Estate Agent Course (https://collegeofrealestate.net/agent)
• $999 SEO & Internet Marketing Course (https://collegeofrealestate.net/seo)
• $1199 How To Be Successful Your First Year in Real Estate 52 Week Course (https://start.collegeofrealestate.net/ca52)

Contact Info:

• Address: 898 Fair Oaks Ave
  Suite A
• Website: https://REHrealestate.com
• Phone: 8887270734
• Email: paul@REHcorp.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/talktopauldotcom
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/talktopaulargueta
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/reh-real-estate-pasadena
• Other: https://youtube.com/c/paulargueta

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