For Bob Lachance, the breakthrough came when he realized that most of his real estate coaching students didn’t lack knowledge, access to funds, or even courage. What they lacked was time.
“Many of them worked part-time or full-time,” Lachance, a former pro hockey player and founder of REVA Global, told Michael Duncan of The Road to Financial Freedom Podcast. “They didn't have time to actually perform the tasks that we needed them to perform.”
Lachance realized he could change everything if he could help real estate investment students leverage their time.
In 2014, Lachance launched his first virtual staffing company, specifically designed to pair beginner real estate investors with qualified remote assistants who know how to do exactly what they need done on a daily basis.
Today, REVA Global employs over 1,000 virtual assistants, most of them based in the Philippines, farming out labor to the real estate, marketing, and medical industries.
Lachance played pro hockey for eight years. Having never finished his degree, real estate was an attractive second career for him.
“I either had to decide to go back to school or jump into an industry that had no barriers of entry,” Lachance said. “So that's what actually got me into real estate — lack of a degree.”
He read books and took courses. One of the courses armed him with an essential piece of knowledge — how to rehab a home that reeks of cat urine. After walking a dilapidated house that smelled like a litter box, he confidently offered $50,000 below asking, closed the deal, and in 2004 walked away from that first rehab with $32,000 in profit.
Flush with success, Lachance faced the same challenge that every new real estate investor faces — where is the next deal going to come from?
That’s what REVA Global teaches its real estate VAs to do — make cold calls, send text messages, post on social media … anything and everything that can be done on a computer in the Philippines to generate leads that could result in the next deal for a real estate investor in the English-speaking world.
They also perform comparable analyses to verify the market value or ARV of the home.
