There are a lot of education options for new real estate investors.
In this article, we are going to review Freedom Mentor by Phil Pustejovsky and tell you everything you need to know to decide whether or not it's a good fit for you.
We'll cover the program, it's founder, and what students are saying.
Let's dive in.
What is Freedom Mentor?
“We are recognized as the greatest real estate mentoring organization in history.”
That’s how the CEO and founder, Phil Pustejovsky, greets you through a 1-minute short video when you land on their website.
Freedom Mentor positions itself as a program that does more than put students through DIY training - a program that truly mentors its students, working hands on with them to close deals and become successful real estate investors.
And like most real estate brands, it's built around the personality of the founder, so in order to understand the brand, we need to understand the founder.
Who is Phil Pustejovsky?
Phil Pustejovsky is known by his self-given tagline of “North America's leading real estate mentor”. He is a best selling author and a real estate investor with 1,000s of deals under his belt.
Phil was born in Texas, had a regular 9-5 job he disliked, and got so bored of, that he fell asleep at his desk a few times. He then got into an altercation with his boss over a day off, and long story short, was without a job, living from his truck, eating canned beans.
From being unemployed and homeless, it only went uphill for Phil.
He states that he met his mentor during his very first flip, who decided to teach him everything he knew in exchange for going 50/50 on the deal.
Fast forward and Phil is now married, living in Florida, and operating a successful real estate investing business, where he offers the same thing that supposedly helped him find success in life: hands on mentorship in exchange for a 50/50 split on the deals his mentees close.
Phil markets his program through books and Youtube videos with the videos being his primary teaching method.
He's a best selling author and does the national real estate speaking circuit. He's also been featured on:
CBS MoneyWatch
Wall Street Journal’s
MarketWatch
Yahoo! Finance
Shared the stage with speakers like:
Robert Kiyosaki
Robert Shemin
Peter Conti
And was featured on big publications such as:
Entrepreneur
Inc.
Huffington Post
Business Insider
Although he has a team, and a business entity named Freedom Mentor, Phil Pustejovsky is essentially the "Freedom Mentor" himself and the mentoring program is built primarily around his personal brand story.
Ok, so what do they actually teach as a business and what services do they offer?
What Does Freedom Mentor Actually Offer?
The very first thing they offer is a free book ‘How to be a real estate investor’ authored by the founder, Phil. What they want in return for the book is your email address. The book itself has a solid rating of 4.4 out of 5 on Amazon based on more than 550 reviews.
But then again, usually, when something is free, you’re the product. See this review:
Another free resource they offer is their blog, which is updated regularly. The blog contains trending and key topics, such as how COVID-19 affects house flippers, principles to manage real estate conflicts, and how to better predict final sale prices.
Furthermore, Freedom Mentor offers a completely free course, which goes through the following lessons:
Getting Started
Buying Real Estate without Cash or Credit (UCF Lecture)
Step by Step Creative Real Estate Investing Formula
Flipping Houses Wisdom (What You Won't See on TV)
Planning Your Future in Real Estate
What You Need to Know Before You Start Investing
That’s a lot of materials, and the course is essentially an aggregation of Youtube vidoes from Phil's channel which are already accessible to the public.
So, why register for videos that you can access without giving up your email?
The additional value is primarily concerning the organized structure the videos, which are presented in a very intuitive order and walk you through the various topics. They are best viewed in the order presented by the course, so if your goal is to learn quickly, going through the course makes sense.
Phil's intro video has garnered nearly 3 Million times over the last five years. Interestingly, the channel, which holds a respectable 300K follower count, is named after Phil, and NOT under his business “Freedom Mentor”.
YouTube was how Phil mainly got started, and why Freedom Mentor became so popular. Phil was one of the very first in the real estate space to start leveraging the platform.
The channel went live in 2009, and has generated over 100M views. It has become popular worldwide due to Phil’s advice, charisma, and enthusiasm on camera. He has the ability to make complicated concepts easy to understand.
Phil claims that what separates his channel from other real estate-focused channels is that what you learn is the ‘pure signal (truth) rather than all the "noise" that is so commonplace out there’.
Additionally, Freedom Mentor has a dedicated page called ‘Inspiration’ where they feature stories of how ordinary everyday people transformed their lives and closed big deals after joining the program. The testimonials include each individual’s life story in a nutshell, including their picture, and even a short recorded video testimonial.
As far as confirming the validity of these testimonials, it’s hard to tell. These people might be paid to show up and praise Freedom Mentor, but it certainly looks believable. It is important to note that the last testimonial posted is 5 years old, dating back to December 2015, which is a bit odd.
That's the free training.
You're hear to learn about the paid stuff.
Although no prices are officially released anywhere online, even on their website, we dug and found the prices.
Freedom Mentor have these two paid programs:
Pre Apprentice program. It costs $997. Fully-Refundable within 3 days.
The Mentorship program. It costs $3000 and then $197 a month. Non-Refundable.
Additionally, for every deal you close under either program, half goes to Freedom Mentor. It used to be a 50/50 split until you hit 500K in deal profits, but the threshold has been tuned down to 100K.
This means that if you closed a 200K deal, you get to keep 100K in profit, giving Freedom Mentor the remaining 100K.
To join Freedom Mentor, you have to apply on the site. Once you apply, a member of Phil’s team will reach out to you sometime afterward to discuss the program. You’ll then be screened on the call to determine if you’re a worthy candidate.
To be accepted you’ll be screened to see if you are coachable, action-oriented, honest, committed, and to have a positive mental attitude.
So, what do these two programs teach? It is very unclear as to what each of the two tiers gives you access to, but here is the pool of resources they promise:
A 10-chapter real estate Supercourse,
A success blueprint with step-by-step plans to follow every week
Quick start audio and video training
A list of funding resources
A library of real estate document templates
A preferred vendor network they call their “million-dollar Rolodex”
A knowledge center
The ePartner real estate deal making automation software
Completed buyer and seller websites for professionalism
A lender database
30 days of coaching with Phil
This program also includes access to a lender database, 2 conference calls per week with other apprentices, daily communication with Freedom Mentors coaching staff, and 3 calls per month with the coaching staff.
Freedom Mentor Program Reviews
As with every product, you’ll be able to find reviews on both sides of the fence.
Here is one negative outlook:
And here's a positive review:
The key distinction to Freedom Mentor is in the hands on approach and the drastically higher costs once the 50/50 split is taken into account.
If you are the type of person who can't figure things out on your own or really struggles to take action without someone right there holding your hand, then it is probably worth it for you to pay $1-3k + $50k on your first $100k in deals.
If you are a self-learner with good initiative who can just embrace from the beginning that this business requires a lot of hustle, then there's not reason to forgo $50k of your first $100k in profit to have someone tell you the same thing each week.
Emotions aside, if it ends up working for you, it's going to be worth it. You'll get a few deals under your belt that you might not have achieved if you'd tried to do it alone, and you'll be able to take things from there solo.
But at the end of the day, Freedom Mentor is having its cake and eating it to. They are making $1-3k upfront, regardless of whether or not you succeed, and then they are collecting a sizeable profit on the back end if you do succeed.
You still have to take on financing, managing, maintaining, and renting or selling the properties. The risk is entirely yours... but the profit isn't.
Those aren't very good terms for you.
Additionally, you might be asked to pay even more upfront. Different price points are floating around online, going up as high as $5k, so it sounds like sales reps might use your application to quote you a price based on your income or experience.
There are also many reports of high-pressure tactics and aggressive salespeople using your contact details extensively to try and push the deal through.
Again, if you are someone who absolutely needs hands-on mentoring, and you can't connect with any local investors near you, this is a viable option to get what you need to move the needle forward, but you'll need to embrace some definite and potential downsides in order to do so.
Next Steps
In our experience, new real estate investors are generally smart, self-starters who don't need to be babied through their first deals.
What they REALLY need is a CONSISTENT method for finding and securing deals.
If you'd like to learn more about how we bring in 30-50 deals every single month, click the link below to watch our new investor case study.
