Creative Real Estate, Mentorship, and AI Leverage with Daron Campbell

Tim Melanson: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to today’s episode of the Work-At-Home Rockstar Podcast. I’m excited for today’s episode. It’s gonna be really interesting. We’re talking to the president of DC Properties, and what he does is he teaches people how to buy creative real estate. Now, I’m very excited to get into that in a little bit more detail and what that means.

But first, hey, Daron, are you ready to rock?

Daron Campbell: I am so excited, Tim. Let’s rock and roll. This gonna be

Tim Melanson: Oh, beautiful. Right on. We always start on a good note, so tell me a story of success that we can be inspired by.

Daron Campbell: My favorite story of success is my own journey in this real estate game. You know, my, my mom and brother and sister and I moved to California from Chicago and they fresh off of a divorce, you know, struggling in every way, single, single parent household. My mom had to go out and get a job at a dry cleaner.

She was the counter clerk of the dry cleaners while I went to high school, then to college. She worked her tail off at that dry cleaner just to keep a roof over our head. We struggled mightily. That’s a whole nother, that’s a book in and of [00:01:00] itself. But we struggled, uh, and the beautiful thing is I discovered real estate along the way, and then real estate allowed me to keep it short.

A long story short. Real estate allowed me to buy that dry cleaners 15 years later and hand her the keys and say, now this is your dry cleaners mom. So that’s my favorite success story of probably a thousand success stories. That’s the number one. And uh, there’s a whole lot that went into that and led up to that, but, but to keep it short, ’cause your time is limited. We, she, she took that job as an $8 an hour employee and 15 years later, she was the owner of that cleaners because of real estate and everything that I had learned along the way, proudest moment of my life, handing her the keys to that cleaners.

Tim Melanson: Wow. Wow, must… Uh, I bet you it was her proudest moment, too.

Daron Campbell: ’cause she was my biggest fan

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: And I, I

Tim Melanson: that’s

Daron Campbell: most of my success to what she taught me and instilled in me as a, as a 4-year-old.

Tim Melanson: Wow. Wow, that’s amazing. Well, okay, so along with those good [00:02:00] notes, though, there’s some things that don’t go as planned, right? And I do like, I do like to talk about that.

Daron Campbell: whole book.

Tim Melanson: Of course it is. Yeah, and I mean, th- that’s what keeps people out of this game in the first place. They’re scared to fail, right? However, you know, with every success, we all, we all hit these bumps in the road, right?

So you shouldn’t be scared of them. So I’m wondering, can you share with me something that didn’t go as planned and what we can learn from that?

Daron Campbell: Yeah. And you know, I love what you’re saying by opening like this, because. People would just simply learn to fail faster. They’ll get to that successful lane that much quicker. And you could be disheartened and heartbroken and you know, there’re gonna be people that are let down and, and, and people get hurt and all of those things.

But you, you interview, you interview everybody, so you interview a successful person. And ask them, have they ever failed at anything? They go, oh, how many of ’em do you wanna hear about?

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: have failed.

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: is to fail faster, fail more often. I have have put together many partnerships where people invested their hard-earned money [00:03:00] into something that I

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: we buy, and things have not always worked out.

I’ve been blessed enough to say that about 90% of them have worked out famously. A few have not. And in one instance, we bought a property that we were sure we were gonna be able to split the property, build two, two houses where there used to be one. Two shiny brand new houses we expected to make. Oh my goodness.

Sometimes these numbers are silly, so I don’t wanna like make it unrealistic for people, but there was nearly a million dollars in profit to be made. Everyone got in and put their money in excitedly. I’m the team leader. I’m responsible for making this go. And then the city I’m in, Los Angeles, the city of Los Angeles changed the building code

Tim Melanson: Oh. Oh.

Daron Campbell: middle of us getting entitlement. So suddenly where we thought we could build two 4,000 square foot brand new homes, suddenly they slashed the density and we could only build 1 2500 square foot home. And so [00:04:00] everything that we had invested for the upside potential got smashed in one simple city council move that killed the, the co, the concept.

So I scrambled to get everybody back to hold and, you know, not lose money, but. Needless to say, they were disappointed. Needless to say, I look like the bad guy because I said, here’s what we can do. And then somebody else, uh, not under my control decided that they were gonna change the, the rules. And so that’s the bad example of something like that happening.

But what I do is I keep my eyes on the rules, and today there are four or five rules I’m taking advantage of right now that have changed in our favor.

Tim Melanson: Ah.

Daron Campbell: of what just happened to me, what would happen to me in that deal? The opposite’s happening right now. There’s a massive shortage of housing in the us.

Cities like Los Angeles where I am, are opening up the doors to adding an additional dwelling unit to the backyard of every house. So today, five years ago, this didn’t exist. Today, every [00:05:00] homeowner can add an additional unit. To their at least one additional unit to their property. Every apartment building owner can add two to three to four additional units if they have the the space to do it.

So it’s the opposite of what hurt me and those investors back then. It’s actually helping us right now. This is one of our best methods for adding value and helping people become wealthy, is you buy, you buy one house and you can suddenly turn it into two or three,

Tim Melanson: Wow.

Daron Campbell: piece of property. So you, you essentially get the land for free to build two additional income producing assets.

Tim Melanson: Wow.

Daron Campbell: that’s how you know the laws can hurt you and then they can help you.

Tim Melanson: Well, I mean, could you have known that that law was about to change? Like, if you had known that it was g- like, did you… Was there a way for you to have known or just, it just happened?

Daron Campbell: I would’ve had to know someone on city council to know that they were gonna wake up one day and, and, and have this knot in my backyard density thing go on. It kinda, it caught us by surprise. It, there was no heads up. It was a, it was a [00:06:00] January one. This is being enacted. you later. Sorry.

Tim Melanson: Wow.

Daron Campbell: at the time you weren’t automatically entitled to be able to split a lot. And double the number of homes on that, in that space. But, and, and so many neighborhoods, the more the, the more expensive the neighborhood, the more adamant the neighbors become about, no, we don’t need more cars.

Tim Melanson: Right.

Daron Campbell: more houses, we don’t need more people. It’s the, that, that NIMBY thing, not in my backyard.

That’s

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: out here. There’s all these neighborhoods that where people will go and say, no, we don’t want more density. ’cause we don’t want more cars and we don’t want more traffic. That plagued building in Los Angeles and many other big cities, Chicago, New York, uh, Dallas a long period of time.

But then we woke up yesterday and we have this massive shortage of housing. And so now all of these cities have had to reverse field and say, okay, builders, we’re gonna let you build more. not gonna worry about cars and parking nearly as much as a [00:07:00] matter of fact. Tim, it’s interesting. Cities have now said if you’re in a zone where you’re near the. Public transportation, we’re gonna let you build even more so where you might be able to build two units on a residential street. near a bus stop or a train station, they’ll let you build eight.

Tim Melanson: Wow.

Daron Campbell: yeah, it’s because we have a shortage of 4 million units. We’re 4 million housing units short in this country.

So what does, what does your audience wanna be in the next five years? Landlord. You wanna be landlord. And that’s why I’m teaching real estate. I’m screaming it from the mountaintops. Everybody needs to get into real estate because the boom for being a landlord is coming. Affordability is difficult. Very few people can afford to own. Most people are gonna be relegated to rent. And if you can put yourself in a position to be the person who rents very good housing to people, you can. You can establish your future. You can set up your retirement, you can set up generational wealth for your kids [00:08:00] and grandkids. And never look back. And just because it’s your podcast, it also happens to be the best stay at home job there is managing your real estate portfolio.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. Awesome. That’s awesome. So let’s talk a little bit about, about practices. Now, I mean, it sounds to me like you had some good, uh, role models early on in life to set you up with some good practices, but tell me, tell me a little bit more about that in your life.

Daron Campbell: Well, in my life, it’s been interesting. I have learned, I learned early on that mentors and role models are the shortcut to success.

Tim Melanson: Mm-hmm

Daron Campbell: everywhere I’ve been, I’ve been fortunate enough to be. I was the squeaky wheel. I was the loud mouth that went to the person that said, Hey, I wanna learn what you know, can you teach me?

And the shocking thing is, Tim, the mentor figure times outta 10 is shocked that somebody asked them for the help.

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: It’s crazy. So. So as a perfect example. My very first job in [00:09:00] real estate, I was a brand new licensee it was this big stuffy firm shirt and tie suit every day. Very difficult environment where I’m selling.

I’m brokering apartment buildings and shopping suits. Really big things that are owned by really rich people who really don’t have time for this 22-year-old kid who doesn’t know anything. I go straight to the number one guy in the company. I say, I’ll give you half the money I earn for the next year.

If you show me how to do what you do. Do you know he was shocked. Do you know No one had ever asked him that. Do you know no one ever even approached him like that. said, well, why are you asking me? Like everybody around here kind of doesn’t like me because I’m, you know, I go, are you the number one agent in the firm nationwide?

He says, yep. I go, that’s why. I go, he says, all right, well you, you’re gonna do everything I say. And the minute you do something, you don’t, you fail to do something I tell you to do. You’re out. I go, whatever you say, sir.

Tim Melanson: Wow.

Daron Campbell: I attached my wagon to his engine and [00:10:00] learned what he did to become number one.

And three years later I was number one.

Tim Melanson: Wow. Wow.

Daron Campbell: that’s how that worked. So mentors. Are your shortcut to success? Everywhere I go, I go and try to find the number one person in it. Like right now, right now, I’m, I’m, I’m online is where I live, my Instagram and I, I coach now I teach, I’m a mentor.

Tim Melanson: Mm-hmm.

Daron Campbell: I’m modeling the top influencers in the business who are doing the most in the realm of online coaching, et cetera, et cetera. I’m modeling this right now.

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: They are my mentors, whether they know it or not, they’re my mentors. So mentors are everything. If you wanted to start something brand new today, you say, Darin, where would you start? I say, go find a mentor. Go find the number one person in that space mimic them. Model them.

And if you really wanna be bold, call ’em up and ask them, could you shadow ’em for six months? Whatever you gotta do,

Tim Melanson: Yeah, that’s brilliant. That is brilliant. And, and you’re right. I mean, hey, I mean, you even offered that mentor something. That’s crazy. [00:11:00] Like, you

Daron Campbell: Hey, I said, I’m gonna give you half of whatever I make.

Tim Melanson: that’s, that’s, that’s amazing that you did that, ’cause, uh, I mean, mentors will even help you even for free, right? I mean, it’s just, it’s surprising.

Daron Campbell: The shocking thing is they’ll do it for free. You know what?

Tim Melanson: Mm-hmm.

Daron Campbell: You are no threat to them. You’re, they, it means nothing. You know what I mean? So was I a threat to him? I’m this kid brand new, 22 years old in the real estate business, didn’t, hadn’t sold a thing. I never even sold a vacuum cleaner before. Much less a $10 million apartment building. He’s making a million bucks a year or more selling apartment buildings at the highest level. Who am I to him? Nobody. What kind of threat am I to him if he opens his playbook and shows me everything he knows how to do? Nothing. Could I take all his clients away? Never. So there was no threat to him whatsoever.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. Yep.

Daron Campbell: you walk up to Warren Buffet and say, Mr. Buffet, I’ll shine your shoes. I’ll bring you coffee, I’ll get you your water, whatever you want. If you just let me hang around and, and, and, and see what you do. [00:12:00] Are interested? He’d probably say, yeah, you

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: No one’s even asked me that in the last 40 years.

Come on Tim, let’s go. mentors are not intimidated by you because they are self-made. They’re comfortable in their own skin. You don’t worry them

Tim Melanson: No.

Daron Campbell: great podcast. If you go to the number one podcaster on planet Earth and I don’t know who that is, and you say, Hey, I wanna know what you do, how’d you become number one? They will tell you, I’ll bet real money that they will open the playbook and tell you how they became number one. With no inhibitions, with

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: back.

Tim Melanson: Well, there’s a, there’s a lot of books about that, too, about how people get started by doing exactly what you just said, like getting coffee for the guy, you know, in the office. I mean, I- isn’t that Think and Grow Rich is even about that, right?

Daron Campbell: That’s stinky girl, rich.

Tim Melanson: you

Daron Campbell: exactly. And then you just model what already works.

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: nothing new under the sun. Well, that’s a great statement because there really isn’t everything. You know, you’re, you’re a musician. Every song, you know.

Tim Melanson: Oh, yeah. Yeah.[00:13:00]

Daron Campbell: hook. It’s riff, it’s bridge from some other song. The guy heard somewhere else.

He’s not stealing it, he is not plagiarizing it. He’s just putting his spin on something he already heard.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. Oh, I agree. I agree, for sure. And, uh, and y- you know, when it, when it comes down to it, too, you actually do learn a fair bit from teaching as well. So i- there’s a benefit to the other side as well, to be the mentor, right?

Daron Campbell: Well, today I’m on stages all the time teaching people about how to grow with real estate. The funny thing is, by teaching, I get reminded of all the things that made all the difference.

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: if you don’t teach, you don’t. Sometimes you don’t remember.

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: you teach, you get reminded and reinforced. Say, well, yeah, that’s right.

That is how that works.

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: it’s, it’s beautiful. It’s a full circle thing.

Tim Melanson: Well, and it’s interesting because a lot of success h- uh, comes from fundamentals, right? I mean, if we l- look at, you know, sports teams and even, uh, and even musicians, it’s the fundamentals. It’s the [00:14:00] little scales. It’s the little things that… And then you kind of get away from those fundamentals after a while, and you, I don’t know, guess you have better ideas.

And then when you start to teach somebody the fundamentals again, then you’re like, "Oh, geez, gotta get back to that." You

Daron Campbell: Oh yeah, I, you can apply it to music. I, I played piano and saxophone growing up and it is those scales, it’s those chords. Everything is built to these little fundamental things.

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: just got through the Super Bowl. Blocking and tackling, made all the difference in the Super Bowl.

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: super trick plays, no magical theories.

Blocking and tackling. And the team that did it the most or did it the best, won the game period. Fundamentals.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. Yep, and then when, and then, you know, when you’re finding that mentor, then they’re the ones that can show you what those fundamentals are in your industry because y- they might not be obvious, right?

Daron Campbell: It might not be obvious, and here’s an even bigger one, Tim. show you what not to do.

Tim Melanson: Mm.

Daron Campbell: made all the mistakes already. That’s why I say it’s a shortcut to success [00:15:00] because they will steer you around the potholes, around the hurdles that slow them down. And a lot of times they’re really happy to give you is I like right now, if you became my mentor, I tell the first thing I teach is the five things not to do,

Tim Melanson: Yep. Yep. Yeah, absolutely. Right on. So let’s, let’s talk a little bit about some of the tools that you use to get success in your business. So, I mean, we live in a digital world, don’t we? And, uh, I’m wondering, you know, are those tools digital or do you still use paper tools?

Daron Campbell: I use paper tools. I use digital tools. I use regular stuff. This is, you know, the beautiful thing about real estate is. as advanced and as digital, and as technological as it has become, and, and as you can use those tools to create leverage and all of that, it’s still basic real estate. It’s still four walls and a roof.

It’s still what, what fundamentally makes that appealing to the person that you’re gonna try to market it, to sell it, to rent it to.

Tim Melanson: Mm-hmm.

Daron Campbell: from [00:16:00] a tool standpoint, I still gotta get out there and I gotta eyeball that hat. I still gotta get out there and say, Hey, there’s dry rot there, there’s termite work there.

We need new floors, we need new windows. So that’s the hands-on kind of old school neanderthal things that I use.

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: from a digital tools standpoint, the internet has flattened the entire world out. So I can shop for properties in Atlanta, sitting here in Los Angeles and make a million dollar decision from this computer.

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: those, the, the, the, the leverage that the internet and soon to be AI that are creating for us, give us more reach, more span. So what, what would it used to take me, you know, four months to find the, you know, to create a half a million dollars in profit? We could probably do in two days now because now we can have, I can pull up a list.

Here’s what I’ll tell you a quick example. We buy a lot of pre foreclosures, so we buy people, people’s properties from them. When they’re in a little bit of trouble, [00:17:00] they’re behind on their mortgage, they lost their job, something like that. Well, I can now take the list of the 1700 people in Los Angeles County that were in that situation last month.

Tim Melanson: Mm-hmm.

Daron Campbell: And I can feed that list into my ai, and the AI will spit out the 15 most probable sellers. And that AI will then narrow my list of the, so instead of me and my team calling 1700 people, we call these 15 first. And

Tim Melanson: Right.

Daron Campbell: find three or four that are ready to sell, just like the AI predicted. And then now we got our next two or three deals and we short credit it with ai.

So we should be able to do or seven or 10 times the volume that we used to do.

Tim Melanson: Wow. Yeah, AI is such a, it’s such an exciting and also scary thing at the same time, right? Because, I mean, it is going to replace quite a few jobs, that’s for sure. However, on the flip side of it, I mean, I, I’ve spoken to so many of entrepreneurs that are, uh, are, that are just, their, their productivity is just going through the [00:18:00] roof because of what they can do with AI.

And to me, you know, uh, being my mission, you know, I want to inspire more people to be self-employed, small business. I, I want the small businesses to grow, the local type stuff, right? And, you know, how can these local businesses… I mean, they’ve got decimated over the last 20, 30 years by these large companies because of what the large companies and the leverage that they had.

But now it, it seems to me like maybe this AI thing is now starting to push that leverage into the small persons, right? And leveling out that f- that playing field. So it’s exciting to me that, you know, if you have a little bit of creativity, you can, uh… And, and some guts, then you can get out and do something even as just one person, right?

Daron Campbell: Yeah. So here’s the thing, what you know how to do and AI specifically will help you do better, and it will help you do it to scale. It will help you do it with leverage.

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: that now with AI more than ever before, you can appear to be as big as [00:19:00] Coca-Cola.

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: to be as viable as Amazon because AI will afford you the ability to, to scale, to leverage, to reach as many people as they do.

So the it, you never are excused from learning the thing and choosing the link technology will help you. Go at 10 x the speed,

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: speed and grow so much faster. Now, no one’s off the hook from learning a thing and learning it well, if you do that, AI will never replace you. If you do that, AI will put a jet engine on you on the back of your business and take you to the next level.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And I mean, all the things that, all the disadvantages of these large companies, like, you know, the, y- y- y- they’re not as personable. They, I mean, they can be highly unethical. Like, there’s a lot of, of major problems with these big, big, big companies that, you know, you’re, if, if we had more and more small [00:20:00] businesses out there with real people that have good ethics that are out there and, and just building their business with these incredible tools, then I just think it, it’s just gonna make the world a better place, in my opinion.

Daron Campbell: It is because it is gonna allow people like you and me to deliver a more personal experience. So now when someone mentees with me, they’re menteeing with me. It’s not a company. It’s not some big, invisible corporate giant. In the sky. Who, where? Who’s this nameless entity? It’s Daron. You are working with Daron and AI and technology and the internet have allowed me to scale so I could talk to a thousand people at the same time.

And they all still feel like they’re working with Daron.

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: brand is Tim. The brand is daring, and now we can deliver the personal touch at scale. We couldn’t have done that 10, 12, 15 years

Tim Melanson: No.

Daron Campbell: but now we can deliver the personal touch at scale that beats the corporate giant every time.

Tim Melanson: Agree. And, uh, you know, on the other [00:21:00] side of it too, like not everybody is cut out to be an entrepreneur. That’s, that’s, that’s for sure. You know, s- some people will be better suited to be employees. However, instead of it being a few companies, right, where everybody’s trying to get into those companies, now we have so many small businesses, and we’re all gonna need a few people in, on our, on our payroll, right?

I

Daron Campbell: Yeah.

Tim Melanson: just is what it is. I mean, once you start to scale a little bit, I mean, you can do quite a bit as a solopreneur, but y- you know, we’ll be able to be the ones hiring into our small businesses. So there’ll always be jobs out there available. It’s not like we’re taking away all the jobs and everybody has to be self-employed.

They’re still gonna be there, it’ll just be instead of working for this big conglomerate where you’re just a number, now you’ll be working for Daron, right? And,

Daron Campbell: That’s right.

Tim Melanson: you know?

Daron Campbell: that’s right. And, and, and we’ve leveled out the playing field with technology so that now you know, you can, you can become valuable to an entity or an organization or a customer,

Tim Melanson: Mm-hmm.

Daron Campbell: you don’t, you [00:22:00] don’t get outperformed by the big, the big giants

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: Technology has, has made us equals.

Now

Tim Melanson: That’s right, I agree. So let’s talk a little bit about your, your guest solo now. Let’s get into the things that you do, and tell me a little bit more about what that… what does that mean, creative real estate?

Daron Campbell: creative real estate just means. Acquiring real estate, therefore growing your financial ability, growing your ability to have legacy wealth growing, your ability to step away from that nine to five, uh, real estate, in my opinion, is the greatest tool to allow someone to do that. And I think at the core, all of us, and I say. Without hesitation, all of us know that we should own real estate at a

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: level. All of us know that real estate has generated more wealth than any asset class in the history of planet Earth. So you need to own your pieces of planet Earth because they will generate wealth. And when I’m sitting there writing, now talking to you while crypto just got [00:23:00] cut in half, and all these people that gave up on traditional assets and put all their eggs in one basket. They’re getting cooked right now and the funny thing is. That, that’s a bit of speculation over there. And the beautiful thing about real estate is it’s not so speculative. There are ways to speculate in real estate, but there are surefire ways to make real estate work for you predictably. That’s the thing.

Predictably, if I, if I come to your neighborhood right now, if I come to Canada and visit you and we go look up and down your neighborhood, we’re gonna find, we’re gonna see a property that’s been neglected. We’re gonna see an empty home that has been sitting there for a while. You’d be like there, that thing’s been empty for like seven months. There’s an owner that’s got a reason to do something. There’s an owner that might sell to me and you at a price that he might not otherwise have sold for because he’s got a special reason to sell. He lives in a different part of the country. It’s a vacant rental. He couldn’t get rented out. He’s, uh, paying a mortgage on it and it’s not bringing in any rent.

Well, that guy might just be incentivized to sell me and you that house. [00:24:00] $300,000 when two years ago it was, it was sold for 500,000 bucks. But the, the, the difference in the value and the price point doesn’t matter because all he knows is he’s spending 4,000 a month on this mortgage that he can no longer afford. So he will do the,

Tim Melanson: [00:25:00] Wow. Yeah. Well, I, I know that with [00:26:00] physical assets, they’re, you know, especially real estate, it’s something that’ll never go to zero, whereas something that’s digital could potentially go to zero. You could lose your money, but you’re never gonna lose it all. Yes, the, the market might drop, it might half and all that stuff, but, but everything’s kind of like e- everything works together.

So as these things come down, so does everything else. So, you know, uh, but, uh, but really that’s one of the things is, uh, even a, you know, a rundown house on a lot, it’s still worth something, right?

Daron Campbell: is still worth something, and even that rundown house on the lot if cleaned up is rentable.

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: it’s sellable. It’s an asset that it’s hard for it to go to zero. I got a terrible example. A really good friend of mine back in the.com boom was putting every penny he had in a OL, and when it was at like 99 bucks, he was all excited.

And then the.com bubble burst

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: to 99 cents and he lost everything he had built up. And the point is. that crypto’s bad. It’s not that stocks are

Tim Melanson: [00:27:00] No.

Daron Campbell: not that commodities are bad, it’s just that they can, they fluctuate in value in price, and they theoretically could go down to a penny.

Tim Melanson: Yep.

Daron Campbell: there’s a certain amount of gambling you’re doing that should be hedged. say don’t buy crypto. I say you should buy crypto with your real estate profits.

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: That’s, that’s the way I look at it.

Tim Melanson: Yeah, I mean, the, the, the risk, the risk can, you know, give you a big reward, but it also could give you a big kick in the butt, right?

Daron Campbell: Uh, let me look. Bitcoin is at 66,000 right now. Four months ago was at 124,000.

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: You, you come on, some people are getting smoked right now

Tim Melanson: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, and that’s one of those things where, uh, I, I mean, if they, if they c- wanna hold it, you know, it’s probably gonna go back up again. You know, that’s great.

Daron Campbell: hopefully they can’t.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. However…

Daron Campbell: dangerous part though, Tim. A lot of people leveraged into those positions and when it hit a certain number, they get automatically liquidated.

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: happen with your real estate, so [00:28:00] just gotta be careful.

Tim Melanson: Okay. Yeah, yeah, that’s a good point, too. So now tell me a little bit more about how, how do we, how do we learn more about you and how your business, and how do we, we learn about, you know, becoming a mentee of you?

Daron Campbell: Well, you can, you can chase me down like a lot of people do. My, you know, everything that I have is just my name Daron Campbell. So my Instagram is Daron Campbell. My Facebook is just Daron Campbell. My YouTube channel is Daron Campbell tv. You can go to Daron Campbell. Uh, Daron campbell capital.com is is the site. It’s pretty soon. Daron campbell.com will be, uh, a brand new site we’re building.

Tim Melanson: [00:29:00] Great.

Daron Campbell: property cash in your pocket immediately you could turn around and resell it at market for $500,000 immediately.

You could lease that property out at a rental number that probably exceeds what, what it costs to finance that 300 that you paid. So there are many ways to monetize if you buy the right way. I just teach people where to find them and how to buy ’em the right way.

Tim Melanson: Wow. Wow. Well, and

Daron Campbell: that’s what the mentorship’s all about.

Tim Melanson: what I like about this is that it, it’s, it’s another way of giving regular people an opportunity to become those landlords because- You know, [00:30:00] we’ve all heard the horror stories of landlords, right? And I mean, i- it’s because, uh, I, I mean, it tends to be that the people who know how to do all this stuff don’t tend to really give that information away very easily.

And, um, however, we do live in an information age where, th- you know, this information is out there now and we can learn how to do it. And so the more, like we said earlier about being self-employed, the more employers that we create, also the more landlords that we create that are regular people with good ethics that are fair with their rent, and they’re not slumlords, right?

Daron Campbell: Exactly, and the thing is, it’s a hedge against being stuck in a nine to five for the rest of your working career. It’s a hedge against being downsized or outsized

Tim Melanson: Yep.

Daron Campbell: It’s a, it’s a, it’s a way to predictably grow. Financially, it’s a way to create monthly cash flow if that’s what you desire.

It’s a way to flip and, and build a nest egg quick, quickly of capital

Tim Melanson: Yep.

Daron Campbell: and, uh, [00:31:00] everyone can learn it. And here’s the thing, here’s the sin of it all. Tim. They don’t teach. I have a degree in economics from UCLA. Do you think they taught me anything about cash flowing real estate while I was learning all those economic principles?

No.

Tim Melanson: Wow.

Daron Campbell: think they taught me about how to finance a home? No. They’re teaching all these other things and we’re learning all these other things, but they’re not teaching us the things that will get us out of, off of the treadmill, off of the, the, the hamster wheel and out of the rat race.

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: gotta be the town crier.

It’s me. I’m gonna be the one, I’m gonna pull the curtain back and I’m gonna show regular people. That’s the key. You said it. Regular people to play this game

Tim Melanson: That’s, that’s awesome. A- it’s the same everywhere. They, I mean, they don’t teach us how to be self-employed. They, you know, y- like you said, I mean, they’re not teaching us how to get off the treadmill, right? And hey,

Daron Campbell: who does it serve if we do?

Tim Melanson: yeah. Yeah, it’s the people running the treadmill that are running our schools, right? So, you know, it’s a matter of now we can, uh, and, and yeah, AI, technology, [00:32:00] all these th- things, uh, you know, the internet, they’re all ways that we can now communicate with each other.

So as we learn things, we can share those knowledges with other people, and all of a sudden now we’ve got our own school.

Daron Campbell: Exactly. Now, why do you think a billionaire like, uh, bill Gates, for instance. donate a half a million dollars to Harvard

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: he dropped outta Harvard. Right?

Tim Melanson: Yep.

Daron Campbell: but, but guess what he’s doing? He’s feeding his employee pool. He wants to keep everyone on that hamster wheel.

Tim Melanson: Yep.

Daron Campbell: Working for him.

Tim Melanson: Yep.

Daron Campbell: not, they’re not teaching how to break out and start your own.

They’re teaching you how to be an employee and keep that employee mentality, and I wanna refute that. I wanna, I wanna crush that system and make more people, owners, we are not teaching our kids ownership

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: table. We should be talking about. Yeah, go ahead, get educated, get that job, but then figure out how you can own that company.

Or go start your own. That’s what we ought to be doing.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. It, it does surprise me that people think that, uh, the, the people s- seem to have this idea that these big, you know, [00:33:00] companies, people, r- very, very wealthy people are giving money as a charity to these places. Come on, they’re buying the influence, right? It’s, uh, no big company like that… Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Daron Campbell: the money and see what he is getting in return for that check. The funny, funny thing is, the first job I had right outta college was I got hired by UCLA to help identify wealthy alums whom we could ask for a big check

Tim Melanson: Oh,

Daron Campbell: a donation. And, and then I quickly, that’s how I quickly realized that the people who could write the big checks, most of them had gotten their, their huge net worth from their real estate holders. That’s kind of what aimed me right at this industry.

Tim Melanson: that’s awesome. So let’s talk about music before we end here. So who’s your favorite rock star, Daron?

Daron Campbell: Oh my gosh. Where’s the list? Begin and end. You know, I’m kind of, I’m into Rapp and I’m into hip hop, and

Tim Melanson: Yeah.

Daron Campbell: kind. I’m a big fan of j Cole, the rapper. I’m a huge fan of his. And then on the other side, I play, I [00:34:00] grew up playing the saxophone and the piano.

Tim Melanson: Okay.

Daron Campbell: I was a giant Grover, Washington junior jazz saxophone fan.

Still am. And anything jazz or, or you know, bluesy like that I’m a big fan of.

Tim Melanson: Ah.

Daron Campbell: know people, you listen to my, you look at my playlist, you’d be like, this dude’s all over the place. ’cause I am, I, I, I like it all.

Tim Melanson: Nice. Do you still play?

Daron Campbell: I tried to, I hired a coach, I hired a saxophone coach. I bought a new saxophone and hired a coach about a year and a half ago, and he dropped me ’cause I canceled so many of the

Tim Melanson: Aw.

Daron Campbell: real estate deals. But I’m going back. I’m gonna get him back ’cause uh, I wanna be good one day, Tim, but I’m just chilling and I got nothing to do. But look at all my bank balances and all my properties. I’m gonna buy a lounge. gonna own the lounge ’cause that can, that way I can guarantee that I can book myself to play

Tim Melanson: Yeah, there we go. Right on. That’d be awesome.

Daron Campbell: Yeah. I’m gonna be, the saxophone is at the, in the band at my lounge.

Tim Melanson: Yeah, that sounds great. What are you gonna [00:35:00] call it?

Daron Campbell: Ooh, man. I wrestled over that. I think it’s gonna be DC’s place.

Tim Melanson: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. That sounds awesome. Well, thank you so much for rocking out with me today, Daron. It’s been a lot of fun.

Daron Campbell: Thank you. I’ve had a great time. I appreciate you, Tim.

Tim Melanson: Awesome. To the listeners, make sure you go to workathomerockstar.com for more information, and we’ll see you next time on the Work at Home Rockstar podcast.