I’m Shawn. I buy houses in Oklahoma and Wisconsin, and I’ve been doing it long enough now to have sat with a lot of people through some of the hardest moments of their lives. I’ve also been knocked down a few times myself, hard enough that I understand what it feels like when things aren’t going your way.
This is the honest version of how I got here, and why I still do it.
Before any of this…
I went to college thinking I’d get into computer programming, but the truth is I didn’t have much direction back then. What I did have was a knack I’d carried my whole life: I’d always bought things and sold things, and it just came naturally to me. I loved the wheeling and dealing. And underneath that, I liked helping people. It’s a simple thing to say, but it’s true. It made me feel good.
For a while I was driving trucks in the oil field in Oklahoma, because that was the best way I knew to make a living at the time. Then a friend handed me an ebook about a guy up in Connecticut who was buying houses. It walked through the whole thing, step by step, how it actually worked. I couldn’t put it down. For years I’d been doing the same thing with cars, taking something rough, putting the work in, making it better, and passing it on to someone who wanted it. The idea that you could do that with houses, and help people out of tough spots while you did, hit me square between the eyes. I knew I had to try it.
The first house…
A couple of months later I bought the first house in 2013, and after all these years I still think about it from time to time.
The seller was a man living down in Florida. We talked for weeks before we ever put anything on paper, and in that time I got to know him well. His story stuck with me. Years earlier he’d bought the house for his family. His son had lived there and raised his kids there for more than ten years. But by the time the man called me, things had come apart. His son had gotten into drugs, the grandkids had been taken away, and the son’s girlfriend was still living in the house, not looking after it and not looking after much of anything.
He’d simply had enough. He wasn’t willing to keep financing a situation that was hurting his grandchildren and running his house into the ground. It was a heartbreaking thing to listen to. But it felt genuinely good to be the person who could step in, take that weight off him, clean the whole thing up, and give him a way to close that chapter and get back to thinking about his family. That was the house that made me understand what this work really was. It was never really about the houses.
Two backyards…
In 2021, after my wife Casey and I had our first daughter, we moved up to Wisconsin, where she’s from, so we could raise our family close to hers. Real estate was really all I knew by then. You know the old line about how, to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So we packed the business up and brought it with us, honestly not sure it would survive the move. We didn’t know if we could run it remotely in Oklahoma from a thousand miles away, let alone start fresh in a brand new state.
For the first couple of years, that’s exactly what we did. We ran everything in Oklahoma from up in Wisconsin, remotely, before we ever bought a single house up north. It has worked out better than we ever could have imagined. Today we’re active in both states, and we genuinely love it, because both of them are home to us now. We could spread out and go nationwide the way a lot of companies do. We just have no interest in that. We’d rather stay in our own backyard and know it well. We just happen to be lucky enough to have two of them.
The one I still carry
A older woman called me in 2018, needing to sell a house down in Norman, Oklahoma. Her daughter, who was somewhere in her late fifties, was living in it and was not in good health. She didn’t special care, there wasn’t much she could do without assistance. What the mother wanted was to move her daughter to Florida, to be near her family and grandchildren. She needed help making it happen, and she didn’t know where to start.
So we bought the house. And then we did the part that isn’t written into any contract. We coordinated the whole move for them. We got all of the daughter’s belongings packed and out of Norman, and we hired a friend of ours to drive a U-Haul the entire way to Florida, with the daughter and her pets along for the trip, so she’d get there safe.
The mother and I grew close through all of it. She was one of the kindest people I’ve come across, and she was so grateful for what we’d done to get everything arranged for her family. She passed away not long after. It truly broke my heart. It felt like I’d lost a friend, because I had. I still think about her.
If you’re the one who needs help now
Maybe you’ve inherited a house and you have no idea what to do with it. Maybe you’ve fallen behind, or you’re going through something heavy, or you’re just plain tired and ready to be done with it. Whatever brought you here, I promise you’re not the first person to sit where you’re sitting, and you won’t be the last one I help.
Reach out and tell me what’s going on. Worst case, you get some honest advice from a person who’s seen your situation before and come out the other side of it. Best case, I take one more thing off your plate and help you close the chapter.
Shawn