Gelkys Delgado: Investment Property Specialist

REE #259 Transcript

[00:00:00] Gelkys Delgado: I'm always shopping, I'm always learning. I'm always reading about every market. I'm not just Miami. What's Miami doing? Mm-hmm. Everywhere. You know, Fort Myers, Tampa, Montgomery, Alabama—I mean, everywhere. I'm always shopping. Wherever there's an opportunity, I'm there.

[00:00:42] Tracy Hayes: Hey, welcome back to the Real Estate Excellence Podcast. Today's guest is the definition of hustle, vision, and execution in South Florida real estate. She's not only a top producing agent in Miami, but also a savvy investor, flipper and portfolio builder, who turned a teenage curiosity into a thriving real estate empire—from riding her bike around neighborhoods at 14, wondering who owned the homes, to handling closings at a title company in high school, to wholesaling deals before she even knew what that was.

This woman's story is relentless. She bought, flipped, and rented countless properties, building true

[00:01:20] financial freedom alongside her husband—all while helping others build wealth through real estate. For her, it's never just been about money, it's been about time, freedom, family, and legacy. Let's dig into this incredible story of Gels Delgado. Welcome to the show.

[00:01:35] Gelkys Delgado: Thank you. I'm gonna have to hire you for my spokesman with that intro.

[00:01:38] Tracy Hayes: Well, I started doing it a couple years ago, but didn't—like, I stepped away from it and then recently I was like, you know what? I wonder what ChatGPT was if I fed it your bio and said, "Goodness, gimme an intro." I like it.

Gelkys Delgado: That's ChatGPT right there?

Tracy Hayes: I like it. I like it. Makes me sound eloquent.

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

Tracy Hayes: So like, appreciate you coming up.

Gelkys Delgado: Thank you.

Tracy Hayes: Like I said, I really do. You know, we were talking pre-show. I really do enjoy being face to face.

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

Tracy Hayes: I mean, like, I've done Zoom, you know, podcast before.

Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

Tracy Hayes: It's just not the same.

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

Tracy Hayes: I mean, I do 'em when I, when I need to, but I appreciate you coming up, but expanding your business—you came up to Jacksonville to tell us about, you know, investors and so forth that you're helping out.

[00:02:19] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah, for sure. I came up here—obviously I wanted to do the show with you.

Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

Gelkys Delgado: But also I came to see some investors. I'm always working with them and they're always asking for my advice and to see if this is a good opportunity for them. So I came to see some of the opportunities that they were presented with and just give 'em, um, you know, a little advice and help 'em out. And I got to

[00:02:40] see some friends. So it was a nice little getaway.

Tracy Hayes: Cool. Yeah, for sure. I'm really curious in digging in—for the agents who are listening, you... you've gone beyond just your residential real estate. You are actually involved—I think if I saw your Instagram, I don't know if that was recent—you just bought a triplex over in Fort Myers, is that right?

[00:02:58] Gelkys Delgado: One under contract.

[00:02:59] Tracy Hayes: One under contract?

Gelkys Delgado: Yes.

Tracy Hayes: There?

Gelkys Delgado: Yes.

[00:03:00] Tracy Hayes: Not yet. How are you consistently searching out these opportunities? Or are people calling you knowing that, that you're interested?

[00:03:07] Gelkys Delgado: Well, at this point, luckily for me, I've created—it's been like 13 years that I've been in the business—so I've created a pretty well-known, like, little network. So people do call me with opportunities all the time, thankfully. But how do I get there? I'm always shopping, I'm always learning. I'm always reading about every market. I'm not just Miami. How—what's Miami doing? Mm-hmm. It's everywhere. You know, Fort Myers, Tampa, Montgomery, Alabama—I mean, everywhere. I'm always shopping. Wherever there's an opportunity, I'm there.

[00:03:36] Tracy Hayes: You're a native South Floridian?

[00:03:37] Gelkys Delgado: I am.

[00:03:38] Tracy Hayes: Yep. Raised? So raised, born, raised there?

Gelkys Delgado: Raised, yeah. Yes.

Tracy Hayes: What area did you grow up in?

[00:03:42] Gelkys Delgado: Um, it's—I'm from Hialeah. It's a little small town.

Tracy Hayes: Okay.

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah, in Miami. Awesome town. But I, I—it was like, I grew up right on the border of Hialeah and Miami Springs. So I went to all the schools in Miami Springs, and I grew up in Miami Springs, and that's where I live.

[00:03:56] Tracy Hayes: My mother-in-law's side of the family is all—were all grew

[00:04:00] up in, in—

Gelkys Delgado: Hialeah?

Tracy Hayes: Yeah, in, in Hialeah. Her and her older—her brother, they talk about living, growing up in a two-bedroom house.

Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

Tracy Hayes: My mother-in-law and her three brothers basically living in the same room.

Gelkys Delgado: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tracy Hayes: Type of thing.

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Tracy Hayes: Um, my wife was actually born in Miami, but then they moved to Jacksonville shortly thereafter. But yeah, I know exactly where you're talking about down there.

Tracy Hayes: Tell us what—so. And I didn't even pick it up, 'cause I just uploaded your bio to ChatGPT. It picked out that 14-year-old...

Tracy Hayes: Thing. Tell us about what your thought process was there. And then—sure. As you start, you know, becoming a teenager and like you said, you were working at the title company, what really just started to interest you in real estate?

[00:04:40] Gelkys Delgado: Honestly, it's hard for me to explain. It's just a curiosity that I've always had within me. You know, like you said in my bio, I was 14, 15 riding a bike. And it's an odd thing to think for a teenager to be thinking about, but I was doing that. I was riding around and like, I wonder if they own—sitting on the porch—I'm like, I wonder if they own that home and, mm-hmm, how can I find out? You know, odd things like that.

And then I remember my back neighbor—my mom's back neighbor—they sold their house and it was a huge lot. It was like double lots. And I remember envisioning like, oh my God, we could knock that house down and we could build like two big apartments there, and having all this vision. And so I told my parents, "Buy the lot."

[00:05:20] And they were like—they had no vision like that, you know?

Tracy Hayes: Right.

Gelkys Delgado: They were like, "What are you talking about? We have nobody." I'm like, okay. So it was just always inside of me. It was always a big curiosity of mine. And then I started learning, like, all these wealthy people were creating wealth with real estate.

Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

Gelkys Delgado: So then that started, you know, piquing my interest even more, and I started learning more and reading more.

[00:05:41] Tracy Hayes: Well, Miami has such a—well, it is like New York City, you know, it's a melting pot of—

Gelkys Delgado: Right.

Tracy Hayes: And you have so much foreign investment, let alone some of the richest people in the world have something there.

[00:05:56] Gelkys Delgado: Right.

[00:05:57] Tracy Hayes: And then you have the common lay person. You know, you have the two ends of the extreme and everybody in between. And Miami's not—it's an old-young city.

Gelkys Delgado: Yes.

Tracy Hayes: You know what I mean? It's—and you've got some areas that I'm sure that you see a lot of opportunities for some flipping and so forth.

Gelkys Delgado: Oh yeah, yeah. For sure.

[00:06:17] Still, yeah. Still in Miami. You would think at this point that it would already be saturated. There's still—like, there's still little interesting little neighborhoods in Miami that are still full of potential to fix and flip. I haven't been doing much flipping in Miami anymore, but that was the bulk of my business, you know, maybe seven... ten, seven years ago.

[00:06:38] Tracy Hayes: Right, right.

[00:06:40] Yeah. Well, I imagine it gets competitive. And then there's companies out there—there's companies here—

Gelkys Delgado: Oh yeah.

Tracy Hayes: And that's all they do, right? They're out there constantly searching for that next flipping opportunity that's, you know, gonna have some return on investment.

[00:06:51] Gelkys Delgado: Right, right.

[00:06:51] Tracy Hayes: Have you noticed—whether in Miami or just in general, in the areas you're looking in—with the way interest rates are working right now, there is still a housing—especially, you know, here in North Florida, there's still a housing demand?

[00:07:03] Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:03] Tracy Hayes: I think there's a lot of people sitting on the sidelines, like waiting for these interest rates to drop.

I had a gentleman last week that, you know, we got pre-approved and he's like, "Well, I'm gonna wait till the interest rates get like five, five and a half percent." And I'm like, hold on, dude. If it gets that low—A, we're gonna have a huge—we're gonna have a refinance boom, I can tell you that.

[00:07:18] Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:19] Tracy Hayes: Two, the price of the house will probably go up $20,000–$30,000, if not more.

[00:07:22] Gelkys Delgado: Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's what I try to explain to everyone that—oh, every time I hear that little comment, "I'm gonna wait till the interest rates go down," I have to remind people, okay, let's marry the house.

Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

Gelkys Delgado: No, it is. "Marry the house, uh..."

Tracy Hayes: "Date the rate."

Gelkys Delgado: Right?

[00:07:42] Gelkys Delgado: And it's gonna cause competition.

[00:07:42] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:07:43] Gelkys Delgado: You know?

[00:07:43] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. I know when people got all upset about that phrase when it came out—I don't know, whatever, a year or two ago—you know, well, it was May of '22.

Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:54] Tracy Hayes: When the rates started to go up. So I think that's about when that phrase came out.

[00:07:54] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

[00:07:54] Tracy Hayes: But it is so true. I mean, it is with the housing demand. It is. You could—and the other phrase is, when's the best time to buy a house? Well, two years ago. Right? So you gotta get in the game. You gotta get in the game and get in the line. The rates will drop. You refinance. That's life, right?

[00:08:09] Gelkys Delgado: Absolutely. Yeah. That's just how it is. That's just part of it.

[00:08:11] Tracy Hayes: Alright, so. What were you doing at the title company as a teenager? And then take that to—now you're 18, 19, 20, you're starting with your adult—mm-hmm—where do you go and how you enter into real estate?

[00:08:21] Gelkys Delgado: So I got into the title company because my mom was always—she worked for like 25-plus years as a manager in a doctor's office. So one of her clients was a real estate attorney—not a client, sorry—a patient from the office. And he told her, "I need someone, like I need someone to answer the phone for my office." And she obviously was like, "Oh, my daughter, let's just put her in. She's, you know, 16, she's dying to work. Let's put her in."

So I got that job, and it was incredible because I started seeing—I was already interested in real estate—so then I started learning more about it, and I started seeing the money that can be made. I mean, I was—I was part of closings of like millions of dollars. I would see investors making thousands and thousands of dollars doing—

[00:09:06] Tracy Hayes: Nothing. The real estate agent checks going out.

[00:09:08] Gelkys Delgado: Yes. And I was just like, oh my God, this is where—this is it. This is it for me.

So I started doing that. I started learning a lot more in that aspect. And then I found myself looking for people in distress

[00:09:20] situations. So like, I learned how to look up people that were like with lis pendens and foreclosures. So I started just going to their house and knocking on their door.

Tracy Hayes: Really?

[00:09:33] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah. And I was, you know, 18, 19 years old. I had no money.

[00:09:37] Tracy Hayes: Now this is what—what time period are we talking about? Because you're post-2008?

[00:09:37] Gelkys Delgado: Oh, goodness. Yeah. This was post-2008—this was 2003, 2004.

[00:09:44] Tracy Hayes: Oh, well not post—it's pre-2008.

[00:09:46] Gelkys Delgado: I'm sorry. Pre, yes.

[00:09:47] Tracy Hayes: All right. Pre.

[00:09:47] Gelkys Delgado: I was—2003, 2002...

[00:09:49] Tracy Hayes: I was taking a decade off of you. You should have—thank you.

[00:09:51] Gelkys Delgado: Thank you. I appreciate that. I should have kept it going.

So yeah, I started knocking on their doors, mm-hmm, and telling them this—and I know that you're in a hard situation, and I wanna see if I can help. I'm a kid knocking on their door telling them that I could help them. So obviously most of the time they told me to leave and, "What are you doing?"

And then once in—I remember the first one that said yes. It was a little old lady. And she told me, "Yes, I do. I need help. I need, you know, how can you help me?" So I was stuck. I'm like, how do I help?

[00:10:23] Tracy Hayes: She was in a pre-foreclosure situation?

Gelkys Delgado: Right.

[00:10:25] So then I remember thinking like, okay, how do I get this—like, this is a really good opportunity. I could get this house. But I have no money. I don’t—I don’t know what to do from here. So I had met—met many investors in the title—

[00:10:40] Gelkys Delgado: —company. So then I thought, well, I could give it to this guy and I could just ask him. I mean, I made $500. Now I look back and I'm like, wow, that guy ripped me off. But I sold it to him. I gave him that lead for $500. And then I started doing that, you know, throughout the months and the years.

$500 then turned to a thousand, and then I started making a little bit more. And I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was wholesaling.

[00:11:00] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. Yeah. And I was, I was kind of trolling through your Instagram and there's—you have a, you do a little video—

Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

Tracy Hayes: —talking about wholesaling.

[00:11:08] Gelkys Delgado: Right.

[00:11:09] Tracy Hayes: And you—you kind of like, more or less fell into it.

[00:11:13] Gelkys Delgado: Right?

[00:11:14] Tracy Hayes: You didn’t even really know what you were doing. But I think a lot of people say, "Oh, wholesaler," but give us kind of like a 30-second—what is wholesaling? What are you actually doing in that process, and how are you making your money in the wholesaling?

[00:11:27] Gelkys Delgado: So basically, as a wholesaler, what I was doing is figuring out a solution for them. You know, I was just the one—

[00:11:33] Tracy Hayes: You were finding—you were finding the deal, right? I mean, that’s—

[00:11:36] Gelkys Delgado: Well, finding the deal was pretty easy at that point. It was just looking for people that needed help. Like, okay, these people are about to get into foreclosure, they’re in a desperate situation. This is the time to try to see if I could get in there.

[00:11:46] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:46] Gelkys Delgado: So that’s what I would do. But basically, as a wholesaler, I just see it as like—you’re just the problem solver. So you’re the one getting everything together. So I’m gonna solve your problem. You have this problem, I’m gonna look for someone that’s gonna get you out of this

[00:12:00] situation, and that person’s gonna benefit ‘cause they’re gonna make money, and in the end, we’re all gonna win. So I think as a wholesaler, it’s just someone that gets everything together and takes care of a problem. That’s how I see it, you know?

[00:12:12] Tracy Hayes: You search out the problem, find it. And I think the average person, we think, "Well, yeah, they might be behind in payments, but they still want to live in the house."

[00:12:20] Gelkys Delgado: Right.

[00:12:20] Tracy Hayes: I imagine maybe that—

[00:12:22] Gelkys Delgado: Happens all the time. Yeah. Yeah. I get that all the time.

[00:12:23] Tracy Hayes: They really, you know—you know, maybe they have equity.

[00:12:26] Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:26] Tracy Hayes: Maybe they don’t.

[00:12:27] Gelkys Delgado: They don’t, yeah. But that’s what I love. I love getting creative, mm-hmm, and seeing like a certain scenario and being like, how can I solve this for them?

Like, it could be something out there, and I’ll be like, okay, well there’s creative financing, and there’s this guy that I know that is willing to do this. And it’s just putting things together—creating teams and a network that I know I could go to this person for this, go to this person for that.

And you know, like I said, it’s just like a whole problem-solving thing for me.

[00:12:54] Tracy Hayes: Right. Obviously, I think people do it for clickbait on social media to get people to click on "Florida Housing Market." You're bouncing around, you’re seeing—you just bought a place, you’re under contract in Fort Myers, you're up here, you're down in South Florida—the whole thing. "Oh, Florida’s housing’s, you know, gonna have a bubble burst."

Mm-hmm. How do you address that?

[00:13:14] Gelkys Delgado: I don’t. I don’t agree with that at all.

[00:13:17] Yeah. I mean, I don’t—Florida is just such a great place to be at, and—

[00:13:20] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:21] Gelkys Delgado: The weather, the people, the everything. It's just an incredible place to be.

Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

Gelkys Delgado: And I don't foresee it happening. Yeah, every time I have investors asking me like, "What do you think about investing in Florida?" And the only thing that sucks about it is that usually the numbers might not make sense for them because of the insurance and because of taxes, as an investment. But the appreciation—I always count on it.

[00:13:45] For Florida, for sure.

Tracy Hayes: Well, there seems to be—I had an agent I’m working with on a deal right now, and he was talking about—he was going on a bunch of listing appointments. And I was talking—'cause our listings are growing.

Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

Tracy Hayes: He says there's people wanting to move out, but where they wanted to move—he had Tennessee. That's a hot area. They have no income tax as well.

Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

Tracy Hayes: The other place I guess he mentioned was South Carolina.

Gelkys Delgado: Okay.

Tracy Hayes: I know you're—you've been doing some stuff in Alabama, which are, you know, low-expense areas, but the reality is: are the jobs there? Is it a desirable place to live?

Gelkys Delgado: Correct.

Tracy Hayes: They may be moving out of here saying, "Oh, this isn't—you know, Northeast Florida is not what it's cracked up to be." I'm sure people down in Miami—they just have the same, you know, people are people. And they're saying—but when they—yeah, there is lower cost, but there’s a reason why it's a lower cost area.

[00:14:32] Gelkys Delgado: Absolutely.

[00:14:32] Tracy Hayes: Absolutely. You know? You know what hotel you want to stay at. Well, I mean, what do you want?

[00:14:37] Gelkys Delgado: Exactly. Where are you gonna go eat at eight o’clock at night? Maybe—

[00:14:40] There’s nowhere to eat at that time. Or McDonald's is always open.

[00:14:43] Tracy Hayes: That’s true. And that's not even cheap anymore.

[00:14:45] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

[00:14:46] Tracy Hayes: So—

[00:14:47] Gelkys Delgado: Absolutely. I’m with you. I think Florida—I don’t believe that it's gonna be—I mean, I'm sure there’s gonna be market shifts, but I always—I feel very confident about Florida.

[00:14:56] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. I think the builders, at least here in Northeast Florida—my opinion is the builders have actually pumped up the values—

Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

Tracy Hayes: —of the homes. So your price points are a little high. And the fact that they are doing so much—and a lot of that rate buy-down, a lot of their rate incentives are built into the cost of the home.

Gelkys Delgado: Right.

[00:15:15] Tracy Hayes: And that has kind of given us a little bit of a bubble.

Gelkys Delgado: Right.

Tracy Hayes: Which, you know, could—I don’t want to say burst—but could cause—

Gelkys Delgado: Right.

Tracy Hayes: —real values—you might see a settlement of $15,000–$20,000 on, you know, $700,000. But I wouldn’t put it—

[00:15:27] Gelkys Delgado: —about a bubble, a bubble burst. You know, that's why I don’t—I feel like, yeah, market shift, yes.

[00:15:31] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:15:31] Gelkys Delgado: But not like any kind of burst, you know?

[00:15:34] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. Well, because everyone’s had such great equity growth in the last five years, you know? So a drop in $20,000 in the price because things are starting to settle where they should be—

[00:15:43] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

[00:15:43] Tracy Hayes: Not, yeah—well, but—

[00:15:44] Gelkys Delgado: Something that needs to be addressed for sure, in at least South Florida—I don’t know if it's like this in Jacksonville, I don’t think so—but it's the insurance.

Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

Gelkys Delgado: I mean, it's just—I mean, I’m paying like almost $7,000 in insurance.

Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

Gelkys Delgado: And that’s absurd.

Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah. So that and the property taxes, you know, that hurts. Flood insurance. So all those things, you know, that hurts.

[00:16:04] Tracy Hayes: I think as a nation we’re getting caught up with—things are being brought up to us, because insurance has a tremendous amount of fraud.

[00:16:10] Gelkys Delgado: Mmm. Oh yeah.

[00:16:11] Tracy Hayes: And the way things were set up. And hopefully Tallahassee’s gonna get, you know, some of those things straightened out.

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

Tracy Hayes: Ease off on the insurance. Alright. So—you go to Kaiser University?

[00:16:17] Gelkys Delgado: I do.

[00:16:21] Gelkys Delgado: Which—

[00:16:21] Tracy Hayes: I've been there because I've—for almost 10 years, probably 2010 to 2020 roughly—officiated, uh, NAIA football.

Gelkys Delgado: Oh, cool.

Tracy Hayes: And when they started their football program, I was going down there, so I know where that is.

[00:16:31] Gelkys Delgado: Okay.

[00:16:32] Tracy Hayes: It’s very hot there. On a noon day in September, it’s very much—

Gelkys Delgado: Yes.

Tracy Hayes: Especially on Astro.

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

Tracy Hayes: Was that just a kind of a stepping stone for you? Or what was your degree? Did you go there with the intent of, “Hey, I’m still involved in real estate”?

[00:16:47] Gelkys Delgado: Oh, no. Not at all. I mean, I went to college because I thought that was just the next step I had to do.

[00:16:52] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:52] Gelkys Delgado: So my brother and I—first generation American—so we were always like, my parents were like, “You have to go to college. You have to go to college,” because they thought that that was just the way, the right thing to do.

Tracy Hayes: Right.

Gelkys Delgado: So, I started college because of that. But I’m not a good student. I’m not a good student at all. And it’s hard for me to sit down and learn that way. I need to learn in other ways. So I struggled a lot. I mean, I finished—I went for my finance degree.

[00:17:20] I started in psychology, and then I ended up in finance, ‘cause I love numbers. But the whole thing for real estate was just peeking at me the whole entire time. I was doing the title company, and then I left there, and then I started working for, like, corporate—in the Department of Education. I started working for universities—

Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

Gelkys Delgado: —in the finance departments. So I got into that whole corporate world, and it was just so hard. It was so hard because it’s like it—

[00:17:46] Tracy Hayes: —didn’t interest you.

[00:17:46] Gelkys Delgado: It didn’t interest me. And then that whole working yourself up the ladder that way—it was just so difficult for me. Yeah, so it was challenging. But I’m happy I got out of there and I got into the whole real estate thing. But yeah, I tried it out and it just wasn’t for me.

[00:18:02] Tracy Hayes: So, what brings you—what brings you back to dive into—and do you go in full time? As a—do you—as an agent? Is that your next step? What?

[00:18:11] Gelkys Delgado: Okay, so I did the whole corporate thing.

Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

Gelkys Delgado: And then I meet my husband, right? So well, before that, I bought my first property when I was 23 years old. And I started renting it out. At first, the first year I lived in it. And when I was living in it, I was struggling to make the payments. Like, I was broke, you know? I was making my payment and I was like, “Oh my God, I have no money for food.” And it was like super hard.

Then I was like, you know what? I got an opportunity from New York to go work at a different school in New York. So I went over there. I had to rent out my place. And when I was renting it out,

[00:18:40] I was actually making like $500 or $600 a month.

Tracy Hayes: That’s a good investment property.

[00:18:44] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah. So I’m like, “Okay, so you know what? I’m not gonna go back to living in it. I’m gonna keep renting it out.” I came back to Miami because New York was just too cold for me.

I came back to Miami and then I got my best friend to be my roommate, so we started sharing expenses while I had this property rented out. And then I started saving money so that I could buy the next property.

So in the whole interim of that, I meet my husband. And one of the things that got us, like, super in sync was this—the love for real estate, the love for the hustle, the art of the sale. Like, he’s also like me. So, he had done a couple flips himself before. And I started telling him, “Look, I’ve always been very interested in just doing—”

[00:19:25] Like, it was honestly for me as an investor, not to be an agent. So he was like, “You know what? Let’s just do it. Like, quit your job and let’s just go full in and let’s just see.”

[00:19:36] Tracy Hayes: What was he doing?

[00:19:36] Gelkys Delgado: He was a business owner at the time.

Tracy Hayes: Okay.

Gelkys Delgado: We had a pharmacy—he had it by the time I met him, like five years in.

Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:45] Gelkys Delgado: But we just sold it maybe four years ago.

[00:19:48] Gelkys Delgado: A very nice business, but it was a challenging business. It was a pharmacy closed to the public, so we only did hospice patients.

[00:19:52] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:53] Gelkys Delgado: So he was handling the business. I left my job—super scary. We weren't even married yet. I left my job—

[00:20:00] I got my license only so that I could save money on commission. So we did that. I had my apartment, I took out money on it. He had two houses that he was like, "You know what, I'm gonna flip 'em." And then with that little bit of money, we started flipping. And we started flipping, and flipping, and flipping. And we turned something small into something huge.

You know?

Tracy Hayes: Right.

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah. And then I got into it. Once I was doing my own investments, then I started meeting other investors that were like, "Hey, you've been doing this already for a long time. Can you help me?" So I started helping them. And then I would get like, you know, friends, like, "Hey, I need to buy a house," and this and that. And then I started helping other clients. And then I was like, wow, I really like this. I really like helping other people either find investments or find their homes.

And then I just went into it. It was honestly by accident, but I love it.

[00:20:48] Tracy Hayes: So a lot of people dream of flipping.

[00:20:50] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

[00:20:51] Tracy Hayes: There's a lot involved.

Gelkys Delgado: Yes.

Tracy Hayes: You need to know—you need to know what you're doing.

Gelkys Delgado: Yes.

Tracy Hayes: And importantly, you're helping people out. I imagine, you know, you've stepped in some—probably some money pits—

Gelkys Delgado: Oh yeah.

Tracy Hayes: —along the line. I mean, and it’s a lot of trial and error. Now, obviously, you—hopefully a lot less money pits.

Gelkys Delgado: Yes.

Tracy Hayes: And money pits meaning, you went and investigated the house and didn’t realize there's this problem. You just didn’t find it, right before you bought it.

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

[00:21:20] Tracy Hayes: How important is—for the, like, the people—you have to find someone like you as a mentor to go in on a couple of—maybe you don't make all the money, you split the money or whatever. Maybe you can share what you do when you’re mentoring someone on helping them do that. But if you want to flip, to find someone who's been doing it—

[00:21:37] Gelkys Delgado: Absolutely.

[00:21:38] Tracy Hayes: —and learn. It'll keep you in it versus breaking you.

[00:21:40] Gelkys Delgado: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I made that mistake when I got in because I had my husband, who had his experience of flipping a couple houses, so I thought that was good enough.

But it wasn’t, you know? Just because he’s done a couple of flips himself doesn’t make him an expert in any way.

Tracy Hayes: Right.

Gelkys Delgado: And there’s a lot of other things that go into it.

Tracy Hayes: Right.

Gelkys Delgado: So a lot of people romanticize flipping, and they're like, "Oh, it's, you know, it’s this..." but it's hard. It’s hard work, and you really have to know what you’re doing. So I made the mistake of going in without a mentor, and I learned a lot of hard lessons.

Yeah. So I would highly recommend people to get themselves a mentor, or to partner up with someone that’s been doing it for a while, and do their couple deals—maybe the first five—with them, and get their feet wet.

But yeah, I think it’s very important. You need to be very knowledgeable in the market. If you’re not a real estate agent or a seasoned investor, you’re not gonna be knowledgeable in that way in the market, you know?

[00:22:40] You have to know that. You have to be very knowledgeable in construction—and believe it or not, which is—it’s a hard thing for you to learn, because, I mean, I’ve never—I’m not a construction worker.

[00:22:42] Tracy Hayes: But—

[00:22:42] Gelkys Delgado: You know, you have to learn a lot of things. And the whole resale of it—you know, you have to see, is there gonna be a market for me to be able to resell this? And then how much time—and time is money—and putting all of these things together is very important. And it’s so easy to lose money on a flip.

[00:22:58] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:22:58] Gelkys Delgado: Very easy.

[00:22:59] Tracy Hayes: Well, I think people lose track of, like you said, the time.

Gelkys Delgado: Yes.

Tracy Hayes: So you’re, "Oh, well we’re gonna—yeah, we can go in there and we could do it ourselves." Okay, well, how many more months is it gonna take you to do that? And you’re paying the taxes. And then if you're borrowing money, you're paying interest on that—

Gelkys Delgado: Absolutely.

Tracy Hayes: —and so forth, and getting back. And it’s eating into your ROI.

Gelkys Delgado: Right, right, right.

[00:23:30] Tracy Hayes: —contractors, right? Which we know in Florida—to find a contractor you can trust and shows up and does halfway decent work—is not easy to do.

[00:23:34] Gelkys Delgado: Very, very much. Yeah. Well, I got lucky in that sense because my stepdad was my contractor.

Tracy Hayes: Okay.

Gelkys Delgado: So it was very easy because I wasn’t being taken advantage of.

Tracy Hayes: Right.

Gelkys Delgado: But still, it was challenging to work with family. So it was very challenging when I wanted something—

[00:23:50] Tracy Hayes: Why are you taking today off? Why aren’t you—?

Gelkys Delgado: I know. Why aren’t you here, buddy? What’s going on? Yeah. So, it was challenging, but you know, it worked out. The most important part is that I think—not getting ripped off by a contractor, you know? Like I said, I haven’t had that experience, thankfully, but I’ve had a lot of investors get really screwed over with that. You know, like if you’re not on top of it—and by on top of it, I mean you need to be there every day.

[00:24:00] I would show up to my flips every single day. "What are you doing? What’s not happening?" And this was family. So, you know—and even like that, they would slack. You have to be on top of them.

Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

Gelkys Delgado: Because, like I said, time is money when there’s a flip.

[00:24:28] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. There’s again—being with a mentor who’s been doing it—may already have these contacts.

Gelkys Delgado: Absolutely.

Tracy Hayes: That’s probably one of the most valuable things you can get from a mentor.

Gelkys Delgado: Absolutely.

Tracy Hayes: Let alone just talking some of the horror stories.

[00:24:40] Gelkys Delgado: Right.

[00:24:41] Tracy Hayes: Tell—share with us—I imagine, you know, one of these... I call them money pits—but one of these ones where maybe you didn’t know something was wrong with it, and then you found out it was obviously a huge expense that might’ve ate into your—or might have made it cause to be a loss for you.

[00:24:55] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah. Thankfully, I haven’t had a loss in a flip, thank God. But I’ve come too close—really close to breaking even.

[00:25:00] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:01] Gelkys Delgado: This one particular one that I remember that was a nightmare was something that I bought sight unseen. And I was pretty comfortable with doing that because of the location of the property. And I was like, "Okay, for sure I got this. It’s gonna be good."

[00:25:14] Tracy Hayes: Was this in the greater Miami area?

[00:25:16] Gelkys Delgado: This is in Virginia Gardens.

Tracy Hayes: Okay.

[00:25:20] Gelkys Delgado: Which is a little small town next—like, adjacent to Miami Springs. Okay. And when I went in there—it was on a crawl base, so the house was lifted. The whole floor needed to be done. Like, the foundation—not the foundation—

[00:25:31] Tracy Hayes: The joists.

[00:25:33] Gelkys Delgado: The joists. All of that needed to be done. So that was like a big headache. And then when we went to check out the roof, the whole attic was just full of mold.

Tracy Hayes: Oh no.

Gelkys Delgado: And I needed to—it was just a lot of money. That one, we made very little profit in it. But that was a really hard six months of my life—

Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

Gelkys Delgado: —just to not make that much. But that was a big learning curve for me. I couldn’t really do much about it because it was sight unseen and I was like, "Okay, the deal looks good." But it was six months of hard work and not a lot of payoff in the end.

[00:26:02] Tracy Hayes: That was pretty much almost like a full gut.

Gelkys Delgado: Oh yeah, it was.

[00:26:07] Tracy Hayes: So like, when you start getting into mold, you start—

[00:26:07] Gelkys Delgado: It was, it was, yeah. ‘Cause when, you know—it was the floor, and then the mold, and the roof, and then the remodel, and it was...

[00:26:12] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. Well, you learned.

Gelkys Delgado: Yes.

Tracy Hayes: You learned from that. You probably have never bought one sight unseen again.

[00:26:20] Gelkys Delgado: I have.

Tracy Hayes: You have?

Gelkys Delgado: I have, because I’m wild like that.

Tracy Hayes: You—

Gelkys Delgado: I’m wild.

Tracy Hayes: Wild. Well, have you ever bought one off, like, the court—like literally off the courthouse steps?

[00:26:29] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

Tracy Hayes: Tell us how that—how does that process work?

[00:26:29] Gelkys Delgado: So this was back then. Now it’s all online. But back then I remember going physically, and it was during—you had to go in physically and do your bids.

[00:26:40] And people were just bidding on each other. And then what would happen is these—you know, the same people would be there every week. So then they started getting to know each other. And then eventually I started realizing, "Okay, these three guys keep getting the houses." So what’s happening is that they would just go in on each other like, "Okay, look, I’m gonna get this one, this is how much," and they would talk about it.

[00:26:57] Tracy Hayes: "I’ll take this one, you take that one."

Gelkys Delgado: Right. So they weren’t bidding against each other.

[00:27:01] Tracy Hayes: Right.

[00:27:01] Gelkys Delgado: So then I was like, "Okay, I need to get in there." So I got in there. I got in there, and then we made it work. That’s how it was back then. Now it’s online—I haven’t done any online—but that’s how it was back then when we did it.

[00:27:12] Tracy Hayes: So you figured out how to join the good ol’ boy network?

[00:27:15] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah. I had to get in there. I was like, why am I being left out here? Then, you know, I got in there and it worked out.

[00:27:19] Tracy Hayes: Because some of those houses—I mean, you can't even get in them, right?

[00:27:23] Gelkys Delgado: You can’t even get in them. I remember this one house—the only one that I bought in an auction, online—was even scarier because it was in Georgia. It was in Augusta, Georgia, and I bought it for $18,000. Like, how do you not? And I was super pregnant. I was—I was two days before giving birth, and I was on the computer and I was shopping. And I’m like, "18,000? I’m gonna start bidding." I think I started off like at 11, and I ended up getting it at 18.

I never saw the property. I just—I closed on it, I won the bid. I came out of the room and I told my husband—

[00:28:00] and he’s like, "What?"

Gelkys Delgado: I’m like, "We got a house in Augusta."

Tracy Hayes: What?!

Gelkys Delgado: He’s like, "What?" I’m like, "Yeah, we gotta—after we give birth, we gotta go check it out."

[00:28:01] Tracy Hayes: And then you have so many days to wire them the money? Is that how that works?

[00:28:05] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah, it’s—well, usually you have some money on—you have to deposit money to make the bids.

[00:28:09] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:09] Gelkys Delgado: And then once you make the bid and you win the bid, wire the money, and it’s yours.

[00:28:14] Tracy Hayes: Did you—what investigation did you look at that you knew that $18,000 wasn’t only gonna get you $30,000? Did you do some pre-investigation to see what was going on?

[00:28:24] Gelkys Delgado: Oh yeah, for sure. Like I said, I’m—I’m in there and I am like—

[00:28:26] Tracy Hayes: What made you feel good about that $18,000? What do you remember?

[00:28:29] Gelkys Delgado: I’m trying to remember back then—this was nine years ago—but I remember just shopping. One of my really good friends had just moved to Augusta and that was one of the main reasons that I had shopped in that area, because I had someone that could go out there and, like, "Hey, can you go help me out and open this door?" or whatnot, you know?

Yeah. So I started shopping because of that in that area. And the $18,000—I think the fact that it was a house for $18,000 and it was a brick home—

[00:29:05] on slab access—yeah. I mean, I was like, okay, this is a no-brainer for me. And I won the bid. I don’t remember exactly the research I did. I’m sure I did a lot of it, but the fact that it was $18,000—that’s what had me in there.

[00:29:05] Tracy Hayes: Well, I mean, obviously a quick calculation—you got a brick home on a slab—

[00:29:09] Gelkys Delgado: Yes. Three-bedroom, I remember that. I don’t know how many baths.

[00:29:12] Tracy Hayes: Right. Yeah, so structurally, you’re not looking at something that’s going out there with termites, I mean—

Gelkys Delgado: Correct.

Tracy Hayes: You could gut the house inside for $18,000. But resale—I mean, it must’ve been at least $80,000 to $100,000, I would imagine.

[00:29:25] Gelkys Delgado: So it was. And I actually kept it for about a year and a half, renting it out.

[00:29:28] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:29:28] Gelkys Delgado: That was the initial—the reason I did it. So it always starts initially because I want to collect cash flow and I want to rent it out. And then a good opportunity arises and I sell it, or you know, whatnot. But this one, I remember having it for about a year, year and a half.

[00:29:48] And then we sold it, and it was somewhere in the seventies or eighties, if I’m not mistaken.

[00:29:48] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm. When going in—and I think the other challenge, like—you get this contractor, or have you gotten savvy—you and your husband—gotten savvy enough to be able to walk into some of these possible flips? Or even, like you said, you flip and hold—you fix and hold.

[00:30:01] Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:02] Tracy Hayes: Be able to go in and do your own poking around—do your own inspection, basically?

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

Tracy Hayes: And calculate roughly—now you’ve done it enough times to calculate, "Hey, this is what it’s gonna cost. This is what we need to budget to get it up to speed."

[00:30:15] Gelkys Delgado: At this point, we’re there. Yeah, at this point we’re there. We’ve never been one to do an actual real inspection. And another thing is that most of our deals are cash. So it’s not like we need a 4-point or a wind mitigation, you know?

We go in there—we go in there with a contractor or with ourselves and we’re like, okay, we’re gonna spend this much money in here, more or less. And that’s how we calculate to see if it would be a good return or not, or a good investment. But yeah, we’ve gotten to that point, definitely.

[00:30:39] Tracy Hayes: How long did it take you to get to that point? For someone listening to this right now, they go, "Hey, I want to do some flips," but you know—again, finding that contractor you trust, it’s not always easy. Maybe you do have a friend or father-in-law who can walk in and walk around and give you a number.

[00:30:59] How do you get—what’s the kind of graduation? What did you see yourself—at some point—

Gelkys Delgado: Experience.

Tracy Hayes: Experience?

[00:30:59] Gelkys Delgado: You know, I had to go in there and see—what does it usually cost to put down a floor? Like, what does it cost per square foot to do a bathroom? You start learning all these things. And then once you go in there, you’re like, okay, I know what tiles cost, I know what sheetrock costs, I know what a roof will cost, you know?

[00:31:18] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. When you’re looking to flip and hold, or fix and—

[00:31:18] Tracy Hayes: When you’re looking to flip and hold—or fix and hold, I should say—I think some people can get... put their personal interest into it.

Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

Tracy Hayes: You know, the quality of your materials, right?

Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

Tracy Hayes: How—you know, are you gonna put vinyl down? Are you putting—you know, obviously all the different flooring options we have today.

What is kind of your ideology on thinking that? Because this is not a home you’re ever going to live in, correct? You have a plan—you’re gonna hold it for whatever, two years, and then sell it. But obviously you don’t want to have to—hopefully not have to—replace the flooring again in two years.

[00:32:00] You want it to last through a renter or two, and then you’re gonna sell it, correct? What is your idea—what’s your thought process when you go through and you’re picking out bathroom fixtures and things like that?

[00:32:06] Gelkys Delgado: So, at first—I have to give credit to my husband for this—'cause at first, when I first started investing, I was that girl. Which I think is pretty typical, that I would go in there and be like, "Oh, okay, we’re gonna go into Floor & Decor, and I wanna make this bathroom this one and this..."

Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

Gelkys Delgado: And my husband’s like, "Hello—reality check. This is not for you. This is, you know, let’s make this as cheap as best as possible."

So he helped me with that. But now that I have that perspective on it, it’s totally shifted for me. I mean, I could care less. To me, it’s—I don’t even care.

[00:32:36] Tracy Hayes: But you want it to be desirable to someone who wants to buy it.

[00:32:38] Gelkys Delgado: Well, correct. When we’re talking about a fix and flip, it’s totally different. When I’m talking about a fix and flip in a nice area—yeah, I really care a lot.

Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

Gelkys Delgado: You know, I care. But what I’m doing right now, which is Montgomery and which is Section 8—renting it to Section 8 people or whatnot—I don’t care. I want it to be livable. I want it to be pretty, like in the sense of, "Okay, this matches." Like, I don’t want to put five different floors.

[00:33:10] But whatever is the most economical and the best thing that I can find—that’s my ideology on it now. What’s the most affordable?

[00:33:10] Tracy Hayes: Because that is another challenge that a flipper will have.

Gelkys Delgado: Oh, for sure.

Tracy Hayes: And generally—I don’t want to accuse the females of it—but that’s what you wanted to—you were visualizing yourself living in it.

[00:33:20] A lot of times, people—

[00:33:23] Gelkys Delgado: Absolutely. You go in there and you’re like, "Oh my God, what would I love?" And you can’t go in there like that because the person that’s gonna buy that property is gonna do their own touches to it, and they’re gonna do their own things to it.

Tracy Hayes: Right.

Gelkys Delgado: So you gotta make it more—like, neutral colors and neutral things. That way, they can just put their own touches on it.

Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

Gelkys Delgado: It could be more desirable for them.

[00:33:41] Tracy Hayes: Well, that just made me think of—and I pulled up this clip, which I think is still real today 'cause it wasn’t even a year ago when I had this agent on—but in the Miami market right now, as far as retail sales, most of the buyers here in Northeast Florida, really—they don’t really want to—

[00:34:00] they want a turnkey house. Are you seeing that in Miami? As investors—no, not investors—just your typical residential, buy-a-primary-residence buyer. They’re not really—this agent made a great statement, which I think has a lot of weight to it in what she saw.

The people—the generations today—buying their first house and so forth, they don’t have this, like, "Hey, I want to invest in this house, and then we’re gonna do some things, and we’re gonna upgrade it over time. In three or four or five years, we’re gonna sell it so we can move to our next." They don’t think like that anymore.

Tracy Hayes: Right. They really want that turnkey. That’s why new construction is so hot.

Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

Tracy Hayes: Because it’s new, right? Everything’s new and it’s—you know, you got warranties and everything. It’s turnkey.

[00:34:37] Gelkys Delgado: Right.

[00:34:38] Tracy Hayes: Are you seeing that kind of same thing in—

[00:34:40] Miami that we’re seeing here, as far as people, when they’re looking at existing homes—they really want them turnkey? They really want the seller to have, you know, everything looking nice and so forth?

[00:34:51] Gelkys Delgado: I guess, you know, maybe because of the type—the fact that I work with so many investors—those are the kinds of clients I get. Even with my first-time homebuyers—I just closed on a property that’s a really young couple, and they need to do a lot of work to it.

And I love their vision, because their vision was, "You know what? It’s a house under $500,000 in Miami," which is—

Tracy Hayes: Right.

[00:35:19] Gelkys Delgado: —you know, hard to find. But their vision was, "You know what? This is our first home, it needs work, but we’re getting it with some appreciation." I think it appraised for like $490K.

[00:35:19] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:20] Gelkys Delgado: And they had that vision. They had that vision of like, it needs work, but I have appreciation. I’m gonna put work into it, and then in a couple years I’m gonna sell it and I’m gonna buy my dream home.

So I feel like a lot of my clients have that concept. But of course, I get—you know, I’ve also had my clients that want turnkey. But I feel like the majority of the clients that I’ve had that wanna buy their properties for residential purposes—I’ve been lucky enough that they’re willing to—it doesn’t have to be turnkey. And they have that vision of, well...

[00:35:47] Tracy Hayes: Do they—maybe they have the same—we often track like kind...

[00:35:51] Gelkys Delgado: Correct. That’s what I was trying to think. And that’s the way—yeah, I was like, you know what—like-minded people. Maybe I attract them and then they see that. And I’m also selling it to them. When I have had clients—

[00:36:00] especially the younger ones—that they wanna buy their first property, I’m putting it in their mind. Like I’m always like, “Guys, well, maybe this—okay, we can buy. That’s your first stone. This is your first step.”

Instead of just buying, “Oh, I have my first house. My house,” no. Like, this will be your first house, and then from there you could—so I’m always telling my clients, I’m always, always putting that in their head.

[00:36:20] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. And you come with great credibility in that fact—in that way. Alright, let’s jump over for the agents who might be listening.

[00:36:27] Gelkys Delgado: Okay?

[00:36:27] Tracy Hayes: Okay. If I go back—you’re doing some flips, you get your real estate license, but you gotta hang it somewhere. Now, maybe at that time you weren’t really concerned about—I mean, were you looking for a brokerage that would—

[00:36:43] Gelkys Delgado: No.

Tracy Hayes: Offer you—?

Gelkys Delgado: No.

Tracy Hayes: You were just doing your flips and you just needed to hang your—

Gelkys Delgado: I just needed my license so that I could save money on commissions when I would buy my flips and I would sell them.

[00:36:49] Tracy Hayes: Right.

[00:36:49] Gelkys Delgado: That was the main purpose of me getting my license. When I got my license, I knew exactly who to go with, which is George and RESF.

Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

Gelkys Delgado: Because my best friend—

[00:36:58] Tracy Hayes: Oh, so you’ve been with George your whole time?

[00:36:59] Gelkys Delgado: The whole entire time.

[00:37:00] Tracy Hayes: Oh, I didn’t realize. Okay. ‘Cause I thought there was a different name under there when I saw your LinkedIn.

Gelkys Delgado: Oh, no, you’ve been with George the whole time.

Tracy Hayes: Okay.

[00:37:05] Gelkys Delgado: From the whole—from day one. I’ve been with him. And my best friend’s dad worked with him. That’s how I was introduced to him.

Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

Gelkys Delgado: And I saw his work ethic, and I saw how hard he worked for his agents. And I’m like, okay, I’m not in this to become a real estate agent, but if I ever wanna learn anything, I know I’m gonna learn it from him. So, I signed up with him.

[00:37:24] Tracy Hayes: Now you’ve been there—has it been 12 years or something?

Gelkys Delgado: Thirteen.

Tracy Hayes: Thirteen years. You already saw positive things from him. Your friend’s father brought you over there. You were like, "Whoa, George—he has all these qualities I like."

Now think about that new agent who doesn’t have all—you know, you graduated up—I wouldn’t say graduated up, but you came through a process, right?

[00:37:55] Of knowing real estate, you’re doing your own flips, you kinda had your own thing going on. You weren’t really like, “Hey, I’m gonna become a real estate agent. I need to make money, you know, finding new business.”

[00:37:55] Gelkys Delgado: Right.

[00:37:56] Tracy Hayes: But now that you’ve been there 13 years—a new agent looking for a brokerage—what were some of the qualities that you saw in George that anybody who wants to do real estate in Miami should consider RESF because of these qualities that George has and what he brings?

[00:38:15] Gelkys Delgado: He has this belief in people, you know, which—it’s really beautiful. Because he sees whatever you don’t see, you know?

So he’ll look at you and be like, “Why aren’t you on the phone? Like, why aren’t you filming you? Why aren’t you doing this?” And like, he really—but it’s like a good pressure, you know? And he really makes you believe in yourself.

And he educates you, and he makes you feel very comfortable. And he doesn’t make you feel intimidated, like, "I can’t ask him this question." I mean, I could—

[00:38:40] text George at any point, any time of the day, and he replies to me right away with an answer. So that’s something that I think is really hard to find.

There’s all these big brokerages out there, but you can’t just pick up the phone and call your broker, you know?

So I think that’s a really big plus for RESF. And then the fact that he’s already gone—he, from before, 13 years ago, he’s been talking about video and he’s been talking about technology and this is where we’re going.

So he has that vision, and I appreciate that because he brought it to my attention and to so many other people—our agents’ attention, you know? And because of that, a lot of us are successful.

So I like the fact that he believes in his agents and he has this big belief in us and he’s always pushing us. And that’s really, I think, hard to find.

[00:39:28] Tracy Hayes: So, the topic—any of my regular listeners, they know—I bring this up all the time, is the importance of... it’s not necessarily always the broker, but the broker typically is, you know, in most offices, the leader. Sets the tone, sets the culture, etc.

Right? The importance of that broker. Their success is always staying out in front of the agents. You were saying George—he's always out there, out front. He’s always teaching, mentoring.

Gelkys Delgado: Right.

Tracy Hayes: You know, and basically leading, as you would expect a leader to do.

Thinking of today—what you know about the business—and you’ve got someone who is thinking about getting into real estate, maybe, you know, taking the course right now, maybe just got their license—

[00:40:00] and they’re going out and talking to some of these brokers—

Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

Tracy Hayes: What are some ways—'cause obviously they’re not gonna know that about George...

[00:40:12] Gelkys Delgado: Right.

Tracy Hayes: You know that because you’ve been with him for 13 years and you had somebody on the inside already giving you some information.

Gelkys Delgado: Right.

Tracy Hayes: How can they find out what you know already? What advice would you give a girlfriend—say they wanted to start here in Jacksonville, George is not here—how would they find a broker or try to find someone like that?

[00:40:29] Gelkys Delgado: You need to interview with people. You know, you need to go and interview with people, talk to people, talk to other agents and see how they like it.

When you meet another agent, “Hey, does your broker sit with you? Does he teach you? Do you have trainings? Does he teach you how to cold call? Does he teach you how to talk to people? Does he teach you how to sell?”

[00:40:53] That’s really important. A lot of these brokerages are just like, “Hey, sign up with me,” and that’s it. There’s nothing left.

[00:40:53] Tracy Hayes: Right.

[00:40:53] Gelkys Delgado: So I would definitely tell them, ask other agents. That’s number one. And then interview with people. See if you and this broker click, you know?

Me and—like with George—I felt that connection. As soon as I met George, it was like nothing, right? It was like we met—it was like an old friend of mine. I’m like, “Oh, okay, yeah, this works.” It was great.

[00:41:11] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:41:11] Gelkys Delgado: But maybe it won’t be like that when you interview with a couple other ones or they have these expectations of you or whatnot.

So I think that would be very important. Interview with as many people as you can and ask the right questions. And those questions involve, “How can you help me?”

[00:41:20] That’s a broker’s job: How can you help me grow and be successful?

[00:41:29] Tracy Hayes: Because it is—you are your own business, right? You’re totally self-employed and you’re entering into a business. You may have an idea how it works, but you don’t know how it works.

[00:41:40] Gelkys Delgado: And that course—like I tell everyone, every time I tell people, “Get your license,” they’re like, “Oh, that course is so hard.” I’m like, cheat through the course. Who cares about the course? Because what they’re telling you in the course has nothing to do with real life.

[00:41:52] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. It just tells you how to renew your license.

[00:41:54] Gelkys Delgado: Right. So who cares about the course? Don’t pay attention. And then just focus. You’re gonna have to put your feet on the ground, and that’s how you’re really gonna learn.

[00:42:00] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:42:00] Gelkys Delgado: You know?

[00:42:01] Tracy Hayes: I think it can make or break a new agent. I think a lot of people—as we know—we have, you know, over 80% fallout.

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

Tracy Hayes: They don’t even renew. You know, you got two years, and they don’t renew, and that’s when the stat comes up: "Hey, they didn’t renew."

We have all this fallout where many of them might’ve fallen out in the first two or three months.

Gelkys Delgado: Right.

Tracy Hayes: If they didn’t match up. ‘Cause would you agree—every broker does their business a little differently?

Gelkys Delgado: Absolutely.

Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:42:24] Gelkys Delgado: Absolutely. But I mean, ultimately it’s the agent. The reason for the fallout—I think it’s like you said—the leader is very important, right?

[00:42:31] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:42:31] Gelkys Delgado: But once—let’s just say you got the leader—even people with the right leader, you know, they fail.

And why do you fail? Because you need to have... you know, I lacked the vision too. I didn’t know that—13 years ago—that I was gonna be doing this 13 years later. But I knew that I needed to hone—like, you have to be consistent, you know?

[00:42:40] So if you’re not consistent with your business, everything’s just gonna fall through the cracks, you know?

So these new agents—they want their phones to ring. Your phone is not gonna ring and someone’s not gonna call you and tell you, “Hey, I wanna buy a house.” That’s not gonna happen.

You gotta go out there and you gotta work. You gotta hustle. You gotta introduce yourself. You gotta tell everyone what you do. You gotta learn.

It is just so many things. You know, the broker’s—

[00:43:12] Tracy Hayes: —gonna tell you or can give you some guidance—

[00:43:14] Gelkys Delgado: Yes. But you have to do it, ultimately.

[00:43:15] Tracy Hayes: And then would you agree, you probably want to find a successful agent in there that’s actually doing it?

Because not all brokers are actually producing.

Gelkys Delgado: Right.

Tracy Hayes: So—which I think is even more difficult. I heard this broker say, “Well, I’m not a—I don’t compete with you.” But there’s also the other side, which is: if you’re not producing as a broker, you may or may not be up to speed with what’s going on either.

Gelkys Delgado: Correct.

Tracy Hayes: Correct?

Gelkys Delgado: Correct.

[00:43:40] Tracy Hayes: So you wanna check that out as well. I have this book—Grit. I don’t know if you’ve ever read this.

[00:43:40] Gelkys Delgado: Oh, yeah. That’s on my read list.

Tracy Hayes: Is it? Okay.

[00:43:44] Gelkys Delgado: Yes, I am dying to read it.

Tracy Hayes: I did listen to it, but then I wanted to have a hard copy—

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

Tracy Hayes: —on my desk. I think every real estate agent has a level of grit.

Gelkys Delgado: Absolutely. Yeah.

[00:43:52] Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

[00:43:52] Tracy Hayes: Um, if you’ve listened—it sounds like you listened to my show—so I call it the “LLC.”

[00:43:59] Gelkys Delgado: Okay.

[00:44:00] Tracy Hayes: You gotta Love what you do.

Gelkys Delgado: Yep.

Tracy Hayes: You gotta be willing—I think, you know, I call the second one Laugh. Love, Laugh.

[00:44:06] Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

Tracy Hayes: Laughing. Because there’s times where—I imagine you’ve had times where a situation might have been a bad flip, might have been just a really bad client where you’re like, “Oh my God, am I even doing the right thing? Should I be doing this?” I think every real estate agent has that moment.

[00:44:23] Gelkys Delgado: Absolutely.

[00:44:24] Tracy Hayes: At least 99% of them do. And then obviously, you know, what are you doing Consistently in your business? That’s my LLC.

So tell us why you love real estate.

[00:44:32] Gelkys Delgado: I love real estate for many reasons. But number one—for myself—it’s been the way for me to attain financial freedom. Something that I never had an example of growing up and I always dreamed about. I come from a really hardworking family, but like I said, they’re immigrants. So it was really challenging for us to grow up, and there was always like a lack of money.

And so real estate has afforded me a lifestyle that I’ve always dreamed of, you know?

[00:45:20] So that’s one of the reasons I love real estate. And as an agent, I love real estate because I genuinely love—like when I see someone, especially when it comes to an investment—that I get them a good investment, and that day they’re like, “Holy crap, this happened!”

It’s like the most magical time of my life. It’s like, wow, I did this for this person. Because I know what it is for me—like I said, I love it because it’s granted me this financial freedom. So when I get to see that in someone else—that they made all this money they never thought they could—it’s so rewarding.

And that’s like the number one. And then I also love my first-time homebuyers. That’s one of my favorite—like, helping them out and “This is my dream home,” and it’s like, oh, I love that part too.

[00:45:43] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. They’re generally the most appreciative, you know, especially—

Gelkys Delgado: Absolutely.

Tracy Hayes: —especially from a lending side, you know. Working—you know, if they’re tight on the income or tight on their assets—and you’re just able to get the deal done for them.

[00:45:54] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah. And they’re so grateful. They show the most appreciation. I actually got my first gift from a client of mine that was a first-time homebuyer. So I’ve only gotten several gifts, ‘cause usually I’m the one giving gifts.

Tracy Hayes: Right, right, right.

Gelkys Delgado: And all the gifts that I’ve received have been my first-time homebuyers. They’re so grateful, and I love them.

[00:46:11] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:46:11] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah, so I love working with them.

[00:46:13] Tracy Hayes: Alright, so the laughter part is a little different. It’s something that I came up with in my own personal life and just setbacks—you know, stupid things we do that set us in the wrong direction.

But now, you know, today having the experience, I look back and I laugh at those. So when a curveball comes at me today, you know, I might step back, but then I’m able to laugh about it and say, “Hey, I overcame that 10 years ago, I can overcome this.”

Tell us about a situation where, you know, maybe it was a bad deal like you said, or a bad flip that really kind of punched you in the gut—

[00:46:40] but today you look back and you tell people at a cocktail party and laugh about it.

[00:46:49] Gelkys Delgado: Oh wow, okay. The first one that comes to mind is the first time we started investing in Montgomery. We bought a building—we bought a 20-unit building there. And we were so excited because we were like, “Okay, this is it. This is it for us.”

We were just gonna buy this big building—20 units. We’re gonna set it up and that’s it. Like, this is gonna be our cash-flowing business. We are going to be chilling. It’s gonna be great.

So we get in there, and oh my gosh, it was so challenging. It was like the hardest 10 months of our lives. Because it was so far away, we’re very hands-on. So my husband was away all the time—he was always in Montgomery—because we quickly noticed that we were being taken advantage of by the contractors.

[00:48:00] Wow. It was a nightmare. It was a nightmare—20 units. It was a lot of work. It was in a really bad area. Like, there was drugs, shootings. It was very challenging.

A little quick story about that—one of the contractors that we had hired, we had told him, “Look, the only way we’re gonna pay you is every time you do a unit, you have to send a whole video of you walking into the unit, showing us everything you did, and then we’ll go ahead and send you the money.”

So the guy would do this—he did this to like three or four units—before my husband was going every week like he was after that.

So he does that. He sends us a video, we send him the money. Then my husband ends up showing up to go see the building and nothing is done. Everything is gutted.

[00:48:29] So this guy was doing these videos—he was doing the work—but then he would replace—he would take out the laminate flooring or the cabinets, and he would put it in the next one. And then he took all his stuff.

So in the end, he would just put it in, take a video, and take it out. So when we got there, everything was still gutted.

[00:48:29] Tracy Hayes: He was doing double the work—

[00:48:31] Gelkys Delgado: Double the work.

[00:48:32] Tracy Hayes: And you were paying for the materials? Like why in the—

[00:48:34] Gelkys Delgado: And—well, in the end he kept everything. I mean, he left—when we got there, obviously we called him out, and the guy answered the phone, and we’re like, “Hey, we’re here,” and he was like, “Oh.” You know, he took off.

And then after that, he never talked to us again. He never answered the phone. But we lost a lot of money. That was just one contractor.

[00:49:02] And then that’s it. We were like, okay, well this is not happening to us again. So my husband basically lived out there. We got the whole building rented out, and then we ended up selling it. We made a lot of money selling it. It was a great investment—

[00:49:02] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:49:03] Gelkys Delgado: But it was very challenging. I would not do that again.

[00:49:05] Tracy Hayes: It was wrenching. It was wrenching to the point of like, “Do we even want to do this anymore?”

Gelkys Delgado: Oh my gosh.

[00:49:10] I mean, we stayed in Montgomery because of the opportunity that we saw while we were there. We learned a lot about the demands and everything there in the market.

[00:49:20] Gelkys Delgado: But that building was a very, very challenging experience for us.

Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:49:22] Gelkys Delgado: But now I look back and I laugh. So every time we have a little—any little hiccup—I’m like, “We got this.”

[00:49:27] Tracy Hayes: Montgomery.

[00:49:28] Gelkys Delgado: “We got this, we got this.”

[00:49:30] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. Well, especially when someone—to me, the heart-wrenching part of that is when you have someone who you put some level of trust in—

Gelkys Delgado: I know.

Tracy Hayes: “Hey, we’re gonna…” and you pay them money, and then they screw you basically on that. And it’s—that’s to me, I think that devastates people more than finding a problem they didn’t know was there.

[00:49:49] Gelkys Delgado: Correct. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Because it’s the disappointment of—not only that, you know, you screwed me over and now I have to pay for everything again—but it’s that disheartening disappointment of, man, bad human.

Tracy Hayes: Yeah, exactly.

[00:50:02] Gelkys Delgado: Exactly. Why would you do this, you know? So it was very challenging. But we learned a lot. Now we know what to ask, when not to ask, what to ask when they’re done with work. We know exactly what we need in order to get them paid.

[00:50:13] Tracy Hayes: Well, just another example why someone who wants to get into flipping—multi-level here, you’ve done it—should find a mentor like you to walk you through four, five, or ten deals. Whatever it takes. Because to go in there yourself, that might be your last flip.

[00:50:28] Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

[00:50:28] Tracy Hayes: Because of a bad experience. That could’ve set—luckily, you guys had the funds and were able to overcome that.

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

Tracy Hayes: If you’re going in there on shoestrings, that could’ve just put you out.

Gelkys Delgado: Oh yeah.

[00:50:40] Tracy Hayes: And you could’ve took a loss just trying to dump the building to someone else.

Gelkys Delgado: Absolutely, yeah. Absolutely.

Tracy Hayes: What are you doing today consistently in your business that you feel moves the needle, gets you new clients, keeps the phone ringing? What are you doing that you think is consistently just moving your business forward?

[00:50:55] Gelkys Delgado: Cold calling. I’ve never stopped.

[00:50:57] Tracy Hayes: Interesting.

[00:50:58] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah. I mean, the majority of the cold calling that I’ve done—to be a hundred percent honest—is for myself. For when I’m looking for investment properties for myself. I’m constantly cold calling.

But within that, then I get other clients and I meet—“Oh, you know, but I wanna sell my house.” And it’s not a good investment opportunity for me.

Anytime I get a client of mine—“Hey, I wanna shop for a house,” or they call me, “Hey, Gelkys, I wanna make an investment and I want this return on my money”—cold calling. That’s my homework. You want this? Okay, then my job is to find you that.

How am I gonna find you that? Either cold door knocking or cold calling. But that’s something that I’m very consistent with, and it’s been—it’s proven to work.

[00:51:37] Tracy Hayes: So you almost put yourself in—well, because you were doing it yourself. You were the buyer.

[00:51:42] Gelkys Delgado: Correct.

[00:51:42] Tracy Hayes: You’re doing it now for other people, but you put yourself still in the mindset that you are the buyer.

[00:51:47] Gelkys Delgado: Right.

[00:51:48] Tracy Hayes: So that’s why you’re cold calling. So when you’re having the conversation, you’re not having it as a safe real estate agent—“Gelks.” You’re having it as, “I wanna buy your home.” Well, it’s not really me—it’s my—

[00:51:58] Gelkys Delgado: Correct.

[00:52:00] Tracy Hayes: —client. But...

[00:52:00] Gelkys Delgado: And then initially, I go in it—even when I’m shopping for a client—I forget about my client. I only think about what they’re requesting of me. Like, for instance, “I want this kind of return and I’m not willing to pay this, this, or that more.”

So I go in with that criteria, but I’m shopping for myself. For me, that’s the way I work. I’m not gonna tell a client of mine to buy something that I don’t believe in—that I wouldn’t buy for myself. So I’m going in it like for myself. I’m not thinking about it as a sale or “I have to get this guy this.”

No. I’m like, “Listen, I have these parameters. How can I find this?” Because that’s my job—it’s to find you a deal.

[00:52:35] Tracy Hayes: Well, I think just having that mindset that you have—that you are the buyer—right? So when you’re having the conversation, you’re not, you know, salesy is not really the word, but you’re able to talk to the potential seller of this property from a standpoint that you wanna buy it.

Gelkys Delgado: Correct.

Tracy Hayes: So you’re having just a natural conversation. And someone’s willing to have a conversation with someone who’s willing to buy something from you—not just trying to be the representative.

Gelkys Delgado: Correct. Absolutely.

Tracy Hayes: Like, that’s interesting. So walk us through your mindset. You have an investor that, you know—“Hey, I’m looking...” I don’t know, I’m sure a lot of people wanna find multi-unit—

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

[00:53:20] Tracy Hayes: It’s like the thing—but it’s not always there. But maybe you can give us an example of someone you had recently, and then what do you do after you have what they want and their return? What do you do next? What’s your—and get to the goal?

[00:53:25] Gelkys Delgado: What do you mean? I get the—like what...

[00:53:26] Tracy Hayes: What investigation you do to start finding, like, “Okay, they want this kind of house, so I need to look in this area.” Okay. And then, of course, they want a return on investment, right?

[00:53:35] Gelkys Delgado: Right. So I—what I do is I get the parameter—whatever they’re shopping for.

Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

Gelkys Delgado: And then, let’s just say it’s in a specific area. So I go in that specific area. And if it’s not in a specific area, then I see, “What area would this make sense for this man or this woman to make this money or this return?”

So I kind of hone down on an area. And then I just start calling through iMaps. I just start going one by one through these properties. And then I use the software Forewarn to get people’s information, to get their numbers.

And I just call homeowner by homeowner depending on—I mean, whatever asset class that I’m looking for: a multi-family, a single-family, commercial—and I just start calling that asset class. And I just start talking to...

[00:54:19] Tracy Hayes: Are you getting the information—because I know there’s a place where you can get the information like, “Hey, what’s their size? Do they have equity in their house now?”

[00:54:25] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah. That Forewarn app has been very good because it actually tells you everything about the person. So it’ll tell you if they own properties. And if they do own properties, it tells you what they owe on their mortgage. So it tells you a lot of information.

[00:54:40] So I use that app a lot. And then I use iMaps, which also gives you a lot of information.

[00:54:42] Tracy Hayes: Interesting.

[00:54:42] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

Tracy Hayes: And then you’re just—

[00:54:46] Gelkys Delgado: I’m calling. I’m not doing research before I call.

Tracy Hayes: Right.

Gelkys Delgado: I’m just calling. Because for me, it’s—first of all, I see it as like two-sided cold calling, because you never know.

[00:54:55] I mean, maybe I’m not gonna get this guy exactly what he’s looking for, but in the interim I might find someone that’s looking to sell or looking to buy, or telling me, “Oh, I wanna buy an investment property,” or...

[00:54:55] Gelkys Delgado: Whatnot. So mm-hmm. I see it from—I'm not cold calling because I need to find this guy a property. I'm cold calling because I want to find this guy a property, but in the interim, something else could happen.

So I'm just calling. When I’m calling the person, then I’ll look up their stuff. Like, if I get them on the phone, I’ll be like, “Hey, by the way, I see that you have this much equity and you have this…” and “Are you interested?” And I’ll start talking to them.

But I’m not doing all this research and then dialing the number—oh no.

[00:55:32] Tracy Hayes: You’re doing enough research to find a parameter, right?

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

Tracy Hayes: You’ll—like the type of... whether it’s a duplex—

Gelkys Delgado: Correct.

Tracy Hayes: Yeah. There’s only certain areas that are gonna be there. I think... well, Miami probably has a lot more of the multifamily than we do here in Jacksonville, but I think we need to get back to—with the affordable housing issues that we have in a lot of places—

[00:55:55] we need to get back to building duplexes and so forth.

[00:55:55] Gelkys Delgado: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:55:57] Tracy Hayes: Because, you know, they’re great investments. But there’s also, you know, our... we like to build these houses—well, of course, some of these houses, you can reach out and touch your neighbor too.

[00:56:06] Gelkys Delgado: Oh yeah.

Tracy Hayes: Yeah. Not much of a yard. But from that standpoint... we definitely need to get back to that part—on a side subject.

[00:56:11] Gelkys Delgado: Alright, yeah.

[00:56:12] Tracy Hayes: Give us a little touch, ’cause your investigation’s wide—you’ve gone out to Alabama, you’ve gone over to Fort Myers, you’re up here helping clients. What made you comfortable doing that?

Because I think a lot of agents who might be listening are like, “Oh, you know, I know northeast Florida here, and I can go and drive over there and touch it, but I can’t drive to Montgomery, Alabama this afternoon and go and touch that house.”

[00:56:41] What gave you the confidence to start to branch out—or just to, I guess, there was enough intrigue to get out there?

[00:56:41] Gelkys Delgado: The internet. I mean, why do you need to be there? I mean, there’s Google Maps. Call the neighbor—call... I mean, I’ve done that.

I got a house in Montgomery—and I’m not gonna go to Montgomery every time I buy a house over there. I have 30 right now.

[00:56:56] Tracy Hayes: Mm.

[00:56:56] Gelkys Delgado: I call the neighbors. I get their numbers. I’m like, “Hey, I’m buying this house. How’s this neighborhood? Has there been any crime?”

I look up crime stats. As long as you know the formula, you can go anywhere. You just need to learn the formula. That’s it.

And then how do you learn the market? You go and you use the internet and you learn the market. Right? And you call people and you ask questions. So just need to learn the formula. That’s it.

[00:57:23] Tracy Hayes: How do you judge it? ’Cause you said you own quite a bit of property in Montgomery.

[00:57:26] Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

[00:57:26] Tracy Hayes: Well, I guess obviously one success has got you motivated to the next one, to the next one—

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

Tracy Hayes: —type of thing. Let me just track the question... I was really going deep on that one. Whether you're gonna flip it or hold it.

[00:57:38] Gelkys Delgado: Okay. Well, currently right now my mentality—it has nothing to do with flips. But I think it’s that part of me, that I love the art of the sale—

Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

Gelkys Delgado: —that sometimes I’m like, “I could flip this right now and start over.”

So currently what I’m kind of going through right now is—my idea is building this portfolio. And I wanna build this portfolio as big as possible.

Right now I’m at 30 in Montgomery, and I have a few in Fort Myers and in Tampa. So I’m trying to build it as much as possible.

[00:58:20] Then I struggle with—for instance, I picked up everything in Montgomery so cheap and at such a great price—that I could flip it right now and then start over.

So I’m in that interim right now—like, “Oh, do I? I could flip this. I could make all this money and then just start over. I could buy the houses again cheap and set it up with Section 8 and then sell it to investors turnkey. And I could keep doing this.”

So I struggle with that big time. Because I call it—my husband’s like, “Just relax. Like, just enjoy it. Like, just sit here, take the cash—”

[00:58:37] Tracy Hayes: Take the cash flow for a little while.

[00:58:38] Gelkys Delgado: “Take the cash flow.”

And I’m like, “No! We can flip it! Gimme more money, and come on!” You know? So I’m struggling with that, but the idea right now is just to hold, to be honest.

[00:58:46] Tracy Hayes: Now, are you having—do you have a management company out there that you’re using, or you’re managing it completely from here?

[00:58:53] Gelkys Delgado: Wow. Yes. Yes. Yes.

We created a team. So like I said, with that building, we spent a lot of time in Montgomery, so we got to know a lot of people. We made a lot of connections over there. So we have our team of contractors, we have our team that shows properties for us, we have our team that...

[00:59:18] Like, so—that helps us. Boots on the ground. And then from here, I list the properties for rental. I do all the paperwork for Section 8. I do all that stuff from here.

[00:59:18] Tracy Hayes: Wow. Well, that’s entrepreneurialism. I mean, you have the faith in it.

Gelkys Delgado: Absolutely.

Tracy Hayes: You’ve fallen, but you’ve gotten back up.

Gelkys Delgado: Yep.

Tracy Hayes: You made the connections out there that—to have 30 homes sitting out there. And I’m sure every month there’s someone moving in, someone moving out, there’s toilet issues, there’s this, that, or the other thing...

[01:00:00] Tracy Hayes: ...issues. Sure. And you're managing it—yeah—from the fact that you're managing it from here is just amazing. 'Cause the ironic thing is, I just had my last show—which occasionally I have a non–real estate agent come in—he was a property manager.

[01:00:07] Gelkys Delgado: Okay.

Tracy Hayes: And we were, you know, talking about the horrors of, you know—

Gelkys Delgado: It's challenging.

Tracy Hayes: Yeah, why some people should hire a property manager just to get themselves someone between them and the renter, so to speak, from a liability standpoint. You’re... you know, that type of thing. And that’s amazing.

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah. Yeah.

Tracy Hayes: I don’t know, you know, how much time you have to be here.

[01:00:07] Gelkys Delgado: You know—I have my husband. Yeah, my husband helps a lot.

[01:00:10] Tracy Hayes: Because you gotta—you know, you got bookkeeping you're doing—

Gelkys Delgado: Oh yeah.

[01:00:12] Tracy Hayes: —the receipts coming in—

Gelkys Delgado: Sure.

Tracy Hayes: —the bills coming in, and, you know, we...

[01:00:15] Gelkys Delgado: My husband and I are such a great team. Like, you know, he handles the majority of the property management and I handle more acquisitions. So I'm constantly looking for new properties, meeting wholesalers, and trying to get more properties—and now bringing in investors that wanna do the same thing as me. So I’m doing more of that side, and he handles more of the everyday—dealing with the contractors, the property management...

Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

Gelkys Delgado: ...and renting out the places.

[01:00:37] Tracy Hayes: Well just—the bookkeeping alone is a job.

Gelkys Delgado: It is.

Tracy Hayes: With that many units, let alone the others you have around... Let’s kind of finish up these last few minutes. You’ve been in the business, you have a high—really, a 30,000-foot level. There’s probably some things in real estate you haven’t done, right?

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

Tracy Hayes: You don’t have—you don’t have a manufactured home park or anything like that, like BiggerPockets. That’s what he does, like—

[01:00:58] Gelkys Delgado: I want to start tapping into developing though. That’s my next little... I'm interested in.

[01:01:02] Tracy Hayes: Well, again, I really think we need to go back to—I think it was the ’80s in Florida—where they were building these communities where there were manufactured homes—

Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

Tracy Hayes: —on golf courses—

Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

Tracy Hayes: —and so forth.

Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

Tracy Hayes: These tight little affordable housing type situations, and we've gotten away from it. We’re building these houses because there is such a demand.

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

Tracy Hayes: There’s enough demand for someone here in northeast Florida—and, you know, St. Johns County being one of the most desirable areas—which now I'm sure you've probably seen, Nassau County, which is above Jacksonville, is becoming a hot market all the way up to the Georgia line.

They’re able to sell the four, five, $600,000 or more, you know, homes.

Gelkys Delgado: Right.

Tracy Hayes: So they’re not willing to go in and, you know, build a manufactured home park—standardized or nice with amenities. 'Cause I—right. When my parents were looking to move down here—and when I was, you know, late ’80s, early ’90s—they were looking at these manufactured home parks.

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

Tracy Hayes: Their friends had places, and they were like, “Yeah, we're gonna go down to Naples. We’re just gonna get in, you know, manufactured home park.”

Gelkys Delgado: Right.

Tracy Hayes: And that was their vision.

Gelkys Delgado: Right.

Tracy Hayes: I think we’ve gotten away from that.

Gelkys Delgado: We have.

Tracy Hayes: So I think people neglect the fact that some of these manufactured homes are built better than your—

Gelkys Delgado: I know.

Tracy Hayes: —your stick-built.

[01:02:17] Gelkys Delgado: And they’re much more affordable, like you said. Yeah. Helping those that need it. I think you’re onto something, and you’re right. It’s diminishing. You don’t see that anymore.

[01:02:27] Tracy Hayes: Even in these areas—which I don’t know if you know that... So if you drive south on 95, you get to the World Golf Village.

[01:02:38] Gelkys Delgado: Okay.

[01:02:39] Tracy Hayes: And they're basically built—there’s gonna be an expressway. It’s gonna come in just north of that exit.

Gelkys Delgado: Oh.

Tracy Hayes: So St. Johns County is one of the most desirable. Top schools, etc. The expressway is gonna go across that Shands Bridge, which goes into Green Cove. So someone’s gonna be able to come up 95, get on that expressway and go all the way around Jacksonville without ever going into Jacksonville.

[01:02:55] Gelkys Delgado: Oh, wow. Yeah.

[01:02:57] Tracy Hayes: So that whole area out there on the other side of the river—the St. Johns River—is now going to have a freeway through it.

Gelkys Delgado: Mmm.

Tracy Hayes: So now people can come to work in Jacksonville, whatever—they can get in a more reasonable commute.

Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

Tracy Hayes: So, obviously, you know, the developers—they’re already out buying that land. That bridge is not supposed to be expanded or finished expanding—it’s just a two-lane road, you know, bridge right now. It’s gonna be expanded into this expressway by like 2030, which is going to open, you know, this huge swath of land.

Well, I mean, if you go out there and buy a big enough—put 10 manufactured homes on it, you're gonna rent those out.

[01:03:32] Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[01:03:33] Tracy Hayes: If not, just take over.

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah, yeah.

Tracy Hayes: So there’s oppor—I think there’s huge opportunities in things like that.

Gelkys Delgado: Absolutely.

Tracy Hayes: And I dunno if you’ve ever been to Green Cove. You ever been to Green Cove Springs?

[01:03:42] Gelkys Delgado: No, but I’ve heard—it’s a little treasure of Florida.

Tracy Hayes: It is.

Gelkys Delgado: I heard it’s like a beautiful little...

Tracy Hayes: Town.

[01:03:49] Gelkys Delgado: Town. Like a little area. It’s like a little—that’s how I feel about Miami Springs too. It’s like a little treasure.

[01:03:51] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. Well, it goes back in time.

[01:03:53] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

[01:03:51] Tracy Hayes: And I had some friends that lived there—he is actually a city attorney—and he was telling, I didn't realize, I was telling a little history. Green Cove Springs is— they called it "Little Detroit."

[01:04:00] Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

[01:04:00] Tracy Hayes: Because what was happening is after World War II, the Navy had a shipyard there and so forth, and the soldiers were coming back and they were dropping them off. Well, how’d they get home? They went and bought cars. So basically, they’re buying up the cars to drive home.

Gelkys Delgado: Got it, yes.

Tracy Hayes: So they called it Little Detroit.

Gelkys Delgado: Wow.

Tracy Hayes: And then before that—before the railroad, Flagler put in the railroad—that was a stop on the steamboat going down the St. Johns River.

Gelkys Delgado: Nice.

Tracy Hayes: As far as they could go.

Gelkys Delgado: Nice.

Tracy Hayes: So it’s had its heyday a couple of times. It’s due to have another heyday here soon.

Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

Tracy Hayes: But yeah, if you actually go to downtown Green Cove Springs, there is a spring right there. They actually have a city pool attached to it. The spring pours a little blue...

[01:04:41] Gelkys Delgado: Wow.

Tracy Hayes: ...and then out into the river.

[01:04:41] Gelkys Delgado: So that’s like one of the most desirable areas here?

Tracy Hayes: It's a little treasure of northeast Florida.

[01:04:43] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

Tracy Hayes: Yeah, there’s a little bit of history there.

[01:04:48] Gelkys Delgado: I’m gonna have to look into it.

[01:04:49] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[01:04:49] Gelkys Delgado: You know, I’ve always kind of been intrigued about living here in Jacksonville.

Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[01:04:52] Gelkys Delgado: You possibly still can find duplexes over there because it’s that old.

Tracy Hayes: Wow.

Gelkys Delgado: And definitely, definitely fixer-uppers, because—I think the other city that’s gonna be on the map, that’s kind of off everyone’s radar, is Palatka, which is just the next city down the river. So if you look on the St. Johns, you will see what’s considered Orange Park, Green Cove Springs...

[01:05:20] and then Palatka is further down. Palatka will be—some of the best bass fishing in the area there. People, all this—those in. But that’s the area where you’re able to go buy some acreage.

[01:05:25] Gelkys Delgado: Mmm.

[01:05:25] Tracy Hayes: If you could find in the old town a duplex or whatever, that kind of thing—or in some of these older homes that just, you know, could be touched up. ’Cause people still like that nostalgia.

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

Tracy Hayes: And of course, you know, those homes are nice there, close to the river, walk into town, that kind of thing.

Gelkys Delgado: I know.

[01:05:38] Oh, I think I found my new little marketing research.

[01:05:41] Tracy Hayes: Yeah, exactly. Some treasures in there. Lot of old manufactured homes in there too, because some of these retirees wanted to just hide, and that’s where they could hide.

Well, they’re not gonna be hiding much longer, ’cause when that expressway comes in, that’s not gonna be that far away.

Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

Tracy Hayes: Yep. So, and then you can get out to 95 within a few minutes as Route 207 goes right into Palatka. Anyway, just some tips—for probably all the agents now who are looking at Palatka—

[01:06:00] yeah, for sure. Which they should already know if you’re in northeast Florida. Chart, know that stuff.

Let’s finish up with just some real estate agent tips.

Gelkys Delgado: Okay.

Tracy Hayes: We talked a little bit about new agents.

Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

Tracy Hayes: All right. New agents found their brokerage, they move in. What, right now with today’s current market, are some—whether they’re in Miami or they are here—what should they be doing?

[01:06:23] Gelkys Delgado: Cold calling. That’s what I wanna say. Cold calling about everything, because I just feel like when you’re on the phone, even if you don’t know what you’re doing, if you don’t have any buyers, if you don’t have any sellers, like nothing—you’re just cold calling, you’re just talking to people, you’re just putting yourself out there.

Yes, a lot of people are gonna hang up on you, but...

[01:06:40] there’s a lot of people that are gonna take your call, and you get to practice selling or talking to them, you know, every single call. And I think it’s a play—

[01:06:49] Tracy Hayes: Give me a conversation.

[01:06:50] Gelkys Delgado: I’ll cold call you.

[01:06:51] Tracy Hayes: You—totally cold call someone. How do you break the ice? What’s some of the things you’re gonna...

[01:06:55] Gelkys Delgado: Um, I usually try to start off something like, “Hi Tracy, how are you doing?” And you don’t know who I am, so you’re gonna—instead of saying, “Hi, may I please speak to Tracy?” No.

“Hi Tracy, how are you doing?”

“Oh, good. Who’s this?”

“Oh, I’m Gelkys. I’m a local agent here in Miami Springs, and I’m just reaching out to all my neighbors just to offer them my service.”

This is something general, just to be general if I’m not looking for anything—just to offer them my services. “I’ve been doing this for a really long time. I would love to sit and meet with you,” something like that.

This is just one of my generalized ones, like just to meet people over the phone...

[01:07:31] Tracy Hayes: Follow Ricky Carr?

[01:07:32] Gelkys Delgado: No, I—

[01:07:33] Tracy Hayes: You don’t?

Gelkys Delgado: I don't.

Tracy Hayes: He has that same mindset like you're just talking about. He talks about—he’s from Alabama actually.

[01:07:38] Gelkys Delgado: Oh, okay.

[01:07:39] Tracy Hayes: He was with—I think he’s with eXp now, but he was with RE/MAX.

[01:07:41] Gelkys Delgado: Okay.

[01:07:42] Tracy Hayes: He sold over a hundred units two years in a row. But his whole thing was that mindset you’re talking about: just call people and start talking. You're not trying to sell them.

[01:07:53] Gelkys Delgado: No. You're just like, offer your services. “What do I do? Hey, listen.” And “What do you have going on?” And I would just ask them. Be interested. Be—

[01:08:00] Tracy Hayes: Be interested.

Gelkys Delgado: Absolutely.

Tracy Hayes: And then he circled—he said basically he ended the call with like, “Hey, by the way, if you know somebody,” or, “Hey, if you were looking to sell, will you call me?”

[01:08:11] Gelkys Delgado: Absolutely.

Tracy Hayes: “Give me a shot.” And that's how he ended the conversation.

Gelkys Delgado: And you follow up. If that person took the time to talk to you more than two minutes, to me that's a lead. That’s a win. And I’m gonna mark them in and I’m gonna give them another call in a couple days or in a couple weeks.

[01:08:22] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. Ricky Carruth—we had him, he came in town back in October and spoke. And he actually has his own podcast, and you see him on Instagram as well.

[01:08:28] Gelkys Delgado: Okay.

Tracy Hayes: But he has that same mindset. Because obviously one of the biggest fears of people is cold calling.

[01:08:35] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

Tracy Hayes: But it’s that mindset that you have—that you're not actually looking for the client.

Gelkys Delgado: Right.

Tracy Hayes: You're just trying to make a connection.

[01:08:41] Gelkys Delgado: I don’t. You're just trying to make a connection. If you go into it like, “Oh my God, I have to make this sale,” yeah, you're gonna freak out. And then you might get scared of the rejection. But I don't care about the rejection because I'm not going in with a sale. I'm going in with: I wanna introduce myself. I wanna get to know you. I wanna know who you are. And I wanna know if in the end we could work together. Maybe you need my services. Maybe you don’t. Maybe I meet a new friend. Who knows?

[01:09:09] Tracy Hayes: You have a lot of other things going on, and obviously 13 years and so forth. So you probably don’t have like, “Hey, today I need to make so many contacts.”

[01:09:17] Gelkys Delgado: No.

Tracy Hayes: But I have—you know, there's teams out there that are starting. These young agents, like, “Hey, you need to have so many conversations today.”

[01:09:20] Do you think a new agent should kind of set that bar for them? Like, “Hey, I need to talk to five people today.”

[01:09:30] Gelkys Delgado: Yes, absolutely. I don’t do it because I feel like I don’t need to anymore. But I feel like when you're starting this, right—this new practice—you have to do that. Because if not, you're not holding yourself accountable. You’ll make your first call, and you hang up, and you're like, “Oh, I talked to someone, I’m done.” No, you have to commit yourself: “I’m gonna do this with five.” Because once you do it with five and then with 10, you're not scared anymore. After a couple months, you're not scared and it’s easy to pick up the phone and do it.

So I don’t do it for myself because I have so many things on my plate. So I just make it like—I don’t care. It’s an hour a day one way or another, and I just make it happen. You know? But I don’t—if I make 10 calls, if I make one and I end up talking to someone for an hour, then it is what it is.

[01:10:08] Tracy Hayes: Do you think it takes off a lot of stress if they don’t actually, like, expect an outcome from the call?

[01:10:14] Gelkys Delgado: Right.

[01:10:15] Tracy Hayes: You know, if you’re doing the call and expecting an immediate, “Oh yeah, I am looking to sell, come on over.”

Gelkys Delgado: Right, right, right. It's disappointing when you hang up and you didn’t get that, you know? So it’s easy to get discouraged. So when you go into it thinking, “I’m just here to introduce myself,” that’s it. Like, I just wanna introduce myself and see what comes out of this. You take that pressure off.

[01:10:33] Tracy Hayes: And you get their contact information, put them in the CRM, get them on your newsletter, whatever you’re doing from that standpoint—that kind of should be your mindset. “Let me see if I can get five new people in my CRM today.”

[01:10:43] Gelkys Delgado: Right, right. And my main goal is to make connections. You know? If you see it in that sense—like, my goal is not to get a sale right now—it’s to get a connection. Because real estate is about relationships and about connections. It doesn’t matter who you work for. It’s about you, right?

So if I make this connection with this person today, and maybe I follow up with them next month and I deepen the connection—by the time in a year from now when they need to sell, they’re gonna think about me. They’re gonna call me like, “Hey, that girl Gel, ’cause she was so nice,” and, you know, it wasn’t salesy, and she didn’t want to sell, and she stayed in touch, right?

And you know, I showed the interest because I care about people. You know? It’s not about “I care about listing your house.” I care about getting to know you and seeing how we could work together—not only now, but 10 years from now.

[01:11:28] Tracy Hayes: Right.

[01:11:28] Gelkys Delgado: You know?

[01:11:29] Tracy Hayes: What is your mindset on your Instagram? ’Cause you do kind of like a “Life of Gel” focus on there.

[01:11:32] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

[01:11:33] Tracy Hayes: Whether you’re showing a home, working out—whatever—you’ve got a little bit of everything on there.

[01:11:38] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

[01:11:39] Tracy Hayes: What is your mindset of that?

[01:11:41] Gelkys Delgado: My mindset for Instagram is just to show people who I am and about my life. The parts that I’m willing to show, which is what’s really important for me— which is real estate...

[01:11:51] Gelkys Delgado: —family and my kids, spending time with them, which is why—

[01:11:53] Tracy Hayes: Cooking. I see a lot of cooking.

[01:11:55] Gelkys Delgado: I don't like cooking, but I have to.

[01:11:56] Tracy Hayes: [laughs]

[01:11:57] Gelkys Delgado: But yeah, cooking, feeding my family, and working out. I feel like having a healthy balance with all of that, I think it's important. And it's something that I love when I get women reaching out to me like, "Oh, you're inspiring me." I love that. You know, I hope to inspire other women to live a healthy lifestyle and to go after their dreams. Like, this is something I always dreamed about. So, you know, that’s putting myself out there.

[01:12:21] Tracy Hayes: I think people have this thing about whether it's YouTube, Instagram, and social media in general.

[01:12:25] Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

[01:12:26] Tracy Hayes: They think they go do a few videos and they expect that phone to ring.

[01:12:30] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

[01:12:31] Tracy Hayes: Now, there's people who will tell you they've gotten deals from Instagram, which—the only way I could think of is someone you did not know messages you through Instagram and says, "Hey, I saw your stuff on here."

[01:12:41] Gelkys Delgado: Correct.

[01:12:42] Tracy Hayes: Then you know it came through Instagram. But that person that you may have cold called three years ago, who's following you on Instagram now, is ready to sell. You may say, “Oh, it’s because I cold called them three years ago,” which—yes, you can give credit there—but it’s because of Instagram they remembered you.

[01:12:58] Gelkys Delgado: I think so. But I'm also big on follow-ups. So, I don't leave it all up to social media. I've been using my social media to generate more leads, and to be a hundred percent transparent, I've gotten a lot of leads. I've never been one to be on social media—I just got into it like last year.

[01:13:15] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[01:13:16] Gelkys Delgado: And ever since I started in around September, October, I've had so much business. But it's because I'm putting myself out there. I'm doing all these videos. I'm public. You know, I'm getting all these new people that are like, "Oh, I've never seen you before. Can you help me?" And I'm in a niche, you know, which is helping investors create cash flow. So I've created a lot of business because of that. But for me, follow-through and following up with customers and clients is very important. I don't leave it up to Instagram.

[01:13:43] Tracy Hayes: But don’t you think—I don’t want to take away from the importance of what you did. You built up such a following—

[01:13:50] Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

[01:13:50] Tracy Hayes: And then you went into Instagram. Those people are following you there too, right? That it’s keeping you top of mind. Right? So you—it’s kind of, you know, we were talking about Joe Rogan pre-show, we were talking about podcasts and stuff, and Joe Rogan had a following, and then he goes into podcasting and it blows up.

[01:14:09] Gelkys Delgado: Right.

[01:14:10] Tracy Hayes: You had a following. You go into social media and now you're—

[01:14:13] Gelkys Delgado: Absolutely. I think it was something that I was missing and I’m very happy that I went that route.

[01:14:17] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. You had a following. All right. This is a challenge that a lot of agents are—I think—are having. Well, we know 70-something percent didn’t even do a deal last year.

[01:14:24] Gelkys Delgado: Mm-hmm.

[01:14:25] Tracy Hayes: Okay. But there’s agents right now in northeast Florida, I know their phone is blowing up. They're going on multiple listing calls a week, that sort of thing.

[01:14:40] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

[01:14:41] Tracy Hayes: You know, of course—I don't know—Jimmy Keith's telling me he’s going on three listing calls today. He tells me that every other day. I know he's got listings. Good. Go Jimmy. But you’ve got some agents that are really busy, and you've got some agents that—it's crickets.

[01:14:56] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

[01:14:57] Tracy Hayes: They're not getting those calls.

[01:14:59] Gelkys Delgado: You need to put yourself out there. You need to get—stop being afraid of the rejection. Those guys are usually—I know a lot of them. And they're all complaining at home. And you know, I talk to them. Some of them are my friends. “Hey, man, how are you doing so good? I haven’t—I haven’t closed a deal.” And I’m like, do you not see me? It's like I wake up and it's hustle, hustle, hustle. Like, that’s what I do. And that’s what you gotta do. You can’t just wait around and wait, like I said—wait for your phone to ring. You gotta go out there. And I know for a certainty: if you go out there—even if you don’t go out there and you just make calls all day—you’re gonna get business. This is the type of business that you gotta put in first. So I would say to them, go out there. Your phone’s not gonna ring by itself. Go out there, put yourself out there, and talk to people. Just go out there.

[01:15:41] Tracy Hayes: I appreciate you coming on today.

[01:15:43] Gelkys Delgado: Thank you.

[01:15:44] Tracy Hayes: And making the trip up. I want you—next time you’re coming up here—to give me a call. Maybe we’ll do a little follow-up show or whatever.

[01:15:49] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

[01:15:50] Tracy Hayes: For, you know, keeping in touch with what you're doing. Is there anything you’d like to add that we haven’t talked about here today?

[01:15:54] Gelkys Delgado: I can’t think of anything right now off the top of my head.

[01:15:58] Tracy Hayes: Well, we’ve been going about an hour and twenty minutes, so I figure that’s usually when I start to, you know, pull the plug on it, but okay. I mean, obviously we could talk about real estate all afternoon.

[01:16:08] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

[01:16:09] Tracy Hayes: But you know, next time you’re up in Jacksonville, let me know. Come in—whatever's going on in the market.

[01:16:13] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah, for sure.

[01:16:14] Tracy Hayes: Maybe you have a new flip. Tell us about what happens with your triplex. Is that gonna be a little fixer-upper or is it ready to go over here?

[01:16:17] Gelkys Delgado: Well, the intention is to hold it. It's not gonna be a fixer-upper. It’s just ready to go. It’ll need some little—you know—little makeup here and there, but nothing crazy.

[01:16:25] Tracy Hayes: Right.

[01:16:26] Gelkys Delgado: Yeah.

[01:16:27] Tracy Hayes: Tell us how that’s going and what’s going on in Montgomery. Let’s stay in touch. And like I said, every time you come to Jacksonville, just let us know. I’ll get you in, we’ll create some content.

[01:16:37] Gelkys Delgado: Yes, let’s do it.

[01:16:38] Tracy Hayes: I appreciate you.

[01:16:39] Gelkys Delgado: Thank you. Thank you, you too, Tracy