We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Erick Martinez a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Erick, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?
My family. I come from a family of Immigrants from a Caribbean island called the Dominican Republic. I’m a first generation American in my family so I had to watch my parent/parents struggle and work hard to be able to provide. I’ve watched my mother go learn and do different things while working to be able to create opportunities for me and my siblings. She sacrificed in order to give us the opportunity to choose and take risks with our future. I owe my success and hard work in life to the family that raised me.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
I am a real estate investor who focuses on using my abilities to buy properties quick for cash, to help people in distressed situations including but not limited to, bankruptcies, foreclosures, probate, etc.
This in turn gets me paid for a living because I’m helping people solve tremendous life problems. Usually the people who solve big problems for other people get paid pretty good money. I have a degree in solving problems as an Engineer. I no longer use it the way I used to for Corporate America but I’m still taking the principles I learned and applying them into real estate. Finding the root cause of a problem and coming up with a solution to remove it.
The feeling of genuinely helping someone out and being able to make great money in doing so is unmatched. I also look to real estate to create and build long term wealth for my family.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
-Communication
-Confidence
-Sales
1.) I speak two different languages and was voted most outgoing my senior year of high school. I’ve always been great at communicating and getting along with others. I was able to expand on that quality/skill set by learning additionally how to understand how others communicate. What their body language tells you or what the underlying thing really is behind the words they say. This has helped me a lot in life.
2.) Always believing in yourself is super critical. The easiest way to put this is that you can’t ask someone to believe in yourself if you don’t even believe in yourself. Learn to believe in yourself FIRST even when nobody else will, and you’ll start to see that your hard work and persistency/consistency will make people start to believe in you
3.) There are two ways to make money in this world. Sales or Service. Think of any job or trade where someone would exchange money to you for something. It’s always going to go back to one of the two. Sales or service. I happen to choose sales. I always have. Even growing up as a kid, I was a little salesman. Why? I think for me personally, there isn’t a cap to how much money you can make with sales. If you’re willing to hustle and willing to learn the skills needed in your industry to separate yourself from your competitors, you can make as much money as you want in sales.
Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?
Really anybody ACTIVELY involved in real estate. When I say actively, I mean people that are actively partaking in real estate transactions. You are closing deals whether it’s buying or selling. You are a part of the process in terms of helping get the deal from Point A to Point Z. That can be from marketing, to acquisitions, to dispositions, to Transaction coordination, to project management, etc.
I’d love to figure out ways where I can use my skillset of being an acquisitions specialist and help us make money together. Whether it’s making some follow up calls to seller for you to help get it past the finish line, analyzing deals, or even adding you to my buyers list, there has to be ways we can collaborate instead of compete.
Also if you have funds just sitting to the side and want to invest in something a lot more secured than the stock market or mutual funds, I can help you start putting your money behind real estate backed assets and earn a passive income return funding real estate projects as a private lender! Reach out to me asap!
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