Real Estate Consulting
ChefPatrick.com
Make $$$ Online Blog
DomainSubway.com
Domain Portfolio
How It All Began
I grew up in New York and moved to Florida with my parents when I was 15. Being from a big city, I found it difficult to fit in. Instead of going to school I played basketball and shot pool all day and worked in a fast food restaurant for spending money. I dropped out of high school in 9th grade, took my GED, and gave community college a try, but I quit after a semester and joined the Air Force.
When I got out of the Air Force I took one corporate job after another but I never settled in one place for long. Either they fired me or I quit before they fired me. It didn't take long before I figured out that I wasn't meant for the corporate world. After a few false starts, I found my way into real estate and bam! My life changed instantly. No more corporate jobs. No more rush hour commutes. No more 9 to 5. I was my own boss.
Real Estate
I got started in real estate in 2005. At the time I had a corporate job and my wife ran a day care. She was obsessed with buying a house to fix up and sell. The more research she did the more excited I got about how it could change our lives. I quit my job and bought my first rehab project. At the time, I had less than $500 in the bank.
Within 45 days of that first purchase I had bought three more houses. I wouldn't say everything went as smoothly as we'd planned. I made a lot of mistakes, and I learned a lot, but after five months we sold the houses and made close to $50,000 in profit. It was crazy. I had zero experience, was not what you'd call handy, and I was a high school drop out, but I made more in those five months than I did in two years working a corporate job. I was hooked.
As nice as it was to make $50,000 in five months, the real story happened just before we sold the houses. I needed to make some quick cash to keep us afloat. A neighbor had asked if I could help him get into the rehab business and by chance I got an email the next day listing a property for sale. We went to look over the place and he was ready to buy there and then.
At this point, I wasn't exactly sure how I could help my neighbor get started. I spoke to the wholesaler who had originally emailed me the property listing and explained the situation. The wholesaler told me I could assign the property to my neighbor and make an assigning fee. So, I put the house under contract, assigned it to my neighbor, and walked away with $3,000, without ever lifting a hammer.
Over the next couple of years, I wholesaled over 200 residential properties and created one of the largest real estate wholesale companies in Florida - Mr. 3 Days, Inc. But, by the end of 2007 wholesaling had started to slow. The real estate market was taking a down turn and short sales were becoming the next big thing. Recognizing an opportunity, I created Property Mitigation, Inc., a nationwide short sale outsourcing company. For an up front fee and a percentage of the sale, we helped investors process short sales. Less than a year later, Property Mitigation was working on over 60 short sales a month.
I built Property Mitigation Inc. into a nationally recognized brand with a highly efficient system of operations. Business was good, but I was starting to get burned out on real estate. In June 2008, I sold Mr. 3 days and Property Mitigation to a long-time business associate. It was a good time to get out. With the economic downturn, a lot of real estate companies and short sale specialists were going out of business. Property Mitigation Inc. is still going strong and processing over 100 short sales a month. The key to the success of the company is their brand and their systems. After taking about a year to rest, I decided to continue doing what I was in real estate on a smaller scale. I still get to enjoy consulting, teaching and negotiating short sales on the side.
Domaining, Blogging and Making Money Online
After selling my real estate companies, I started to think about new ventures and new ways make money. Both Mr. 3 days and Property Mitigation had made effective use of websites, and used the Internet to reach out to customers. I knew the Internet was the key.
I had no experience with domain names, but in May 2008 I signed up for a couple of online forums and started buying domain names. To date I've acquired roughly one thousand names. I view domain names as virtual real estate. I apply the knowledge and skills from my real estate career to domaining. My experience building real estate companies had taught me the importance of branding and so I created DomainSubway.com and started to build a reputation as a domainer. DomainSubway was my primary website, blog, and domain name portfolio showcase, all rolled in to one. I created another blog, DNKitchen.com, to report on domain names industry news.
I've met a lot of people and made a lot of connections in the domaining business. It's clear to me that domaining is just one of many ways to make money online. This insight helped me decide to rebrand myself yet again changing DNKitchen.com to ChefPatrick.com.
With ChefPatrick.com I have a new brand and a new place to discuss all of my online interests, including domaining, blogging, and affiliate marketing. In less than a year's time, I've created a site that has over twenty thousand visits monthly. I use not only great content, but videos, podcasts and weekly comic strips as well, to give my visitors a new experience every time they come back. I'm thrilled to know my blog has grown to be one of the top blogs in the domaining industry.
Currently, my plans are to continue making my blog the best that it can be with innovative features and fresh content. I am also working on putting some educational materials together for bloggers about issues relating to blogging and making money from it. I have other projects as well, but I need to have a little mystery.
That's me in a nutshell. If you still have questions about me or have any ideas you'd like to discuss, feel free to contact me through any of the channels you see on this page. I hope to hear from you!
"Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful." ~ Albert Schweitzer
