 All right, cool and the old chicken wings a little still tender, man. Chicken wings are tender. My left chicken wing, I went and got a vaccine on Thursday. Oh, yeah. Which one did you get? Moderna. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. I have family members that work at, they work in healthcare in Virginia. And I guess the rolling out of the vaccines in Virginia has been much more prominent than Maryland and DC. Even though I live in DC, they're having an issue filling up the appointments from a day-to-day basis. Like they're having, they have more vaccines than appointments in the, in some of the small rural areas in the state. So I qualified for it and I jumped in the car and got it done. You know, I got you, man. Yeah. So, all right. Yes. So we're live now, guys. Welcome. Um, it's been what Josh probably, it's almost a year since, since we, I think so. We sat down a year ago and talked about what, what we thought would happen. What, what craziness has occurred in the last 12 months, right? I mean, the, from the state of unknowing last March and April, where this market was going to go. And you know, that's, that's why I wanted to come back and kind of recap how everything, you know, in 12 months has now transitioned completely opposite of what you used to do. So for a lot of my subscribers that don't know you, give them, you know, the, the 5,000 square foot, you know, view of where, where you started and what you were doing pre-pandemic. Yeah. So I give you a quick synopsis. Uh, a lot of folks may, may already know my background. Um, like a lot of folks I moved to DC to work for the government as a federal government worker back in 2004, cut the real estate bug in like 2008, uh, did my first deal in 2009, uh, went full-time investing. It didn't go full-time actually until 2016 and then was doing new builds all the way through right before COVID, um, average resell price point here in Northern Virginia for our projects was somewhere between, uh, one to 1.2 on average. Uh, we called it affordable luxury, which for Northern Virginia, that, that price point for new builds was, was on the lower, lower side of things. Um, and then we decided to do, after having that business, uh, DC first probably is for like more than six or seven years, decided to do a total pivot. Um, right after the time you and I spoke last time, uh, essentially throwing everything out the window, including the kitchen sink. Uh, even my email has changed. Our employees emails have changed. Our website has changed. Um, literally down to the side of the door, everything is different now. And so 12 months later, like, totally new business, totally new industry. And if, if someone didn't understand where you were this time last year, I mean, I think when we were spoke, when we last spoke, you were mid-project or coming out of project and then then this whole lockdown happened, right? So we were averaging something like 15 to 20 projects a year and we were right in the middle of a bunch. We had like nine lots that we were either owned or under contract and ready to start building on. Um, and shortly after the conversation you and I had, I think it was not even maybe two months after that, we slowly liquidated everything. Um, and dropped every single project we had. Our price points on those projects was going to be somewhere between all of them actually were a little bit more, like 1.2 to 1.5. Um, and I had a, it was actually, I started listening to Ray Dalio a lot when COVID happened. I think you and I talked about that a year ago. So I listened to Ray Dalio and Ray Dalio said that events like COVID are always the same, like in history, there's multiple occurrences of similar things like this, uh, maybe not a pandemic, but something that causes a similar response. And what he said was that meeting potato companies survive and thrive. And not only that, the ones that are innovators will do really well. And I started to really think about everything Ray Dalio talks about. And I thought, you know, we've been doing the same thing for six or seven years. COVID has really changed everything. Um, do we really want to continue to be a luxury or semi-luxury builder in Northern Virginia where, you know, permits were taking twice as long to get even 12 months ago. Construction costs started to go up now, like framing materials, like almost double of what it was a year ago. Um, the business just seemed to be getting harder by the day. And the environment that we're in was changing. So I'm like, does it make sense to continue doing this sort of, you know, brick and frame business when, to me, like real estate today is a tech based industry, if you really think about it. Yeah, yeah, I mean, as simple as I could pull up an app on my phone, find cops, find, you know, new construction, get all my comparables down. And I didn't have to go anywhere. It's literally, it's in my pocket every day. It's what I, what I travel with, you know, but yeah, like you said, with material costs, I mean, we were finishing a project last fall. Thankfully got out of that deal by early November. COVID starts coming in end of February. And I think everyone in our industry had no idea what was about to happen, right? Would that be a fair assumption? I think so. What's interesting to me though, like as we were liquidating all these lots, we had a couple of pennings that we weren't even sure they were going to go through. But when the lending environment came back online, I think it was like in May. The exact opposite response happened as a lot of people know. Um, all of a sudden supply went to like a fraction of what it's been. I think right now we have a million units nationwide actively for sale. It's literally a two month supply of single family homes nationwide. Um, a six month supply, which is a sort of a market that's barely going up is like 2.7 million units. So our supply went to like a fraction of what it should normally be. And then because of low interest rate environments, I mean, we had up until three weeks ago, we had some of the lower interest rates in God knows how many years, 15 or 20 years. I think it's bumped up three quarter percent in the last four weeks, but between the low interest rate and low supply, you know, actually prices started to take off in almost every market across the country, which is exactly the opposite of what I think a lot of us expected. Um, but, but that being said, like we decided to transition completely out of building and I think, you know, last summer, I started doing this deal maker nation show as a co-host and we started interviewing all these hope high profile speakers and I started to realize that maybe I was thinking too small as a business owner that, you know, maybe me doing 15 or 20 projects with our company a year here in Falls church Fairfax County, you know, we, we had become essentially what you would want to call the shark in a small pond. And like Raphael Vargas came on the show, he talked about like a blue ocean go where a blue ocean opportunity is. I'm like, we've been doing the same thing for five or six years. We're in the middle of a pandemic and I don't see our business getting bigger. I mean, we're fighting to get those 15, 20 units a year in our market. And at that time we transitioned into a full on wholesaling model and changing entire business from from ground zero back up. Gotcha. So actually, I had it pulled up here. So this is your your newest, newest venture that evolved out of out of the pandemic and getting out of the traditional brick and mortar construction side. We're actually going through a fourth iteration, but about another four weeks from now, we'll have we'll be launching a brand new website. This is the third iteration and there's there are weaknesses to having. You guys can see who did the website, but there's weaknesses to having this particular type of website. And that's what we've learned the hard way the last three or four months now. OK, what are you? So, I mean, it's no secret. This is a traditional carrot website. Lead, general type of website. Yeah. What are if you can share, like, what are some of the hiccups and what you guys are hoping to change to make it more efficient or absolutely. So I give you a little back story. So last June, I didn't even believe that virtual wholesaling was something that could be done. It seemed impossible to make. Yeah. And then we started to to experiment with this whole virtual wholesaling model and we got a deal under contract in Orlando and we made about 30 grand on it in three to four weeks. And we ended up JVing that deal with another individual in Orlando who ended up bringing us a hedge fund buyer. So it was actually a hedge fund that took down the deal. And that one deal changed our entire world because then we realized last June that not only is not only can we do deals virtually, there's other buyers out there like Ken Clotheer says, always aligned with the if you're a wholesaler, find the biggest buyers out there, align with the biggest buyers. Well, right now today, the biggest buyers in the U.S. and growing are hedge funds. No, hedge funds are buying thousands of units every month. Our biggest client right now wants to own a million properties in the next five years, a million single family homes. They actually believe the return on single family homes is better than multi primarily because of lower turnover. When they renovate the single family homes, put a traditional client that they have a certain business model, but their traditional client is a 30 to 40 year old couple. And in their probabilistic model, that client will stay in that single family home for no less than four to five years. There'll be no turnover. So when you look at multifamily and some of these other bigger investment strategies, the biggest expense is turnover. So doing that one deal, getting it sold to hedge fund back in June of 2020, we started to realize, man, there's massive buyers out here. There's massive deal velocity in other markets. And when we looked at Northern Virginia, we're like, there's very little deal volume in Northern Virginia. When you compare it to another market like in Atlanta or a Charlotte or or a Houston or a San Antonio or any of these other markets have like five to six X of deal volume that we do. That was a game changer for me. And then I realized that we were going to have to change everything because when your business is a builder, like we were doing 15, 20 units a year, you're only geared to do like one or two deals a month, to like get one or two good deals a month. So going back, we realized that the lead generation was going to have to be a major focus because at the end of the day, real estate investing is how good are you at generating leads? If you can't generate leads, nothing else matters. Going back to last July, we were saying to ourselves, like, we got to become the best in the business at generating leads. Whatever that's going to take and we knew we weren't the best. We knew we were good in our local pond, getting one or two great deals. But when you're talking about doing 30, 40, 50 deals a month, you got to be extremely efficient and great at uncovering deals. And that's where we go into this talk about PPC. So we're doing two major avenues of lead generation today and it's taken the last seven months to work it out. And we're still refining, but the first one is online. And online today is more important than ever. I think search volume during COVID went up like 250 percent. So we realize that Google Pay Per Click is huge. We got to figure out how to do that. We're now on our fourth iteration. So we're on our fourth lead PPC manager and we're on our we're we're soon to be on our fourth website. And going back to your question, the issue with, in my opinion, the carrot website and what I'm learning from some other sources as well, that I've seen the same thing. You cannot track the performance of your lead conversion very, very well. So, for example, when you're when you're spending like 30 grand a month in PPC and you got these leads coming in, you want to know what they clicked on, where they clicked, with what frequency and if they either converted or they clicked off and where they clicked off from. Essentially comes down to this concept of Google Tag Manager and the Google Tag Manager integration into the current website we have is very basic. It doesn't allow you to most systems in the world perform well when you can track past performance. So you got to see the feedback of what happened previously or find it to move forward. You can't really do that with the website we have currently. So we're in this new duration where we're going to integrate Google Tag Manager. We're going to track down to the pixel of where they click, what's working, what's not. And that's how you refine, I think, between your website and your actual Google campaign. That's how you refine the whole system to work better. Got you. And then I have some friends that are doing similar. Are you then able to then cross market with like a Facebook ad that then would track, in a sense, track that person because that pixel is already in their browser. So that's like a Facebook pixel. But there's also Google retargeting as well. Yeah. Like when you're on a CNN or ESPN website and you see the same ad showing up again, a lot of folks are doing just Google retargeting. I think the industry is mixed, to be honest with you. OK. Yeah. Because I know, at least with Facebook, any of them really, you can get up in some in some numbers with that, you know, the pay-per-click type stuff. I mean, you're going to you're going to spend some money doing it. So if you don't have the infrastructure to streamline it, so it goes one, two, you know, you're in a sense the same as your website. Three step home sale. It needs to be cookie cutter. Right. Yeah. I mean, the problem with Google pay-per-click is you literally can run. Everyone's talking about it being like a golden solution right now. Like there's every guru in the country is talking about PPC. But the reality is, I mean, you can go through money like there's no tomorrow very quickly. Yeah. And you won't even realize if you've got the wrong people on your team, you won't even realize what's happening or why it's not working. I mean, we blew, I think, in January, like 27 grand that month on a manager that, in my opinion, the results were very inefficient. A lot of folks are talking about eight to nine X ROI on marketing. Right now, we're seeing in our business with our current manager who I think is is pretty good. We're seeing about a five to five and a half X return. That's in our current model today. I do believe we can get better than that. I don't know how much better. I don't I don't know if eight to nine is really feasible, but I think we'll know by quarter three if we can refine our system to get there. And then what what is entailed? I know you said currently that you guys are active in about 18 18 markets right now. Yeah. What what does what is the pathway forward? What what infrastructure do you need to have in place to launch the next market? Is it going to be basically picking up the structure now and launching the same type of campaign? Or is that going to obviously probably going to change from market to market? So we blew up the whole business back last summer, and we literally I was literally changing people's emails while they were still working here. So like you had a DC first email. Now you had like a three step home sale email. Now you have a new job title. We literally blew the company up and we're transitioning over while everyone was even still here. But essentially last summer, we decided, you know what? We need to compartmentalize the business better. So to be an effective investor, I believe you need the following departments or some iteration of them. You need a lead generation department. You need a acquisitions department. You need an underwriting department. You need a transaction coordination department, and you need either a disposition or a management department or maybe both. So we broke the business back down into those compartments last summer. And then when you have those departments defined and you have people that are managing each department, you're going to quickly realize what people are able to handle in terms of capacity of whether it's leads or contracts or acquisitions like hot, hot, hot, almost conversions. So for example, on the lead side, I know that a text messenger can effectively handle 300 texts a day. I know that a call caller can probably effectively manage maybe four to five hundred calls a day. I know that a lead manager that oversees all of them can manage about two to three markets tops in my model, in our model today. So you kind of reverse engineer everything back out and you realize what kind of staff you need. I believe an acquisition associate can handle about three to four leads a day. More than that, it becomes cumbersome to be able to take those in and follow up effectively. So essentially it comes down to reverse engineering the whole business out and seeing what kind of capacities you can handle. But I will say this, we're paying probably right around two hundred dollars a lead on pay per click. OK, so you can do the math on that and you can you can figure out how many leads you're getting a day. And as you scale your budget, you'll be able to factor in how many more acquisitions managers or associates or lead managers you need to continue to scale. Got you. We're only doing offline in three markets right now. So we're doing two different ways to lead generation. We're doing offline lead generation, where we're mining the data. That's only happening in three markets, but then we're doing online marketing in 18 markets and offline is harder to sort of scale. Online is easier to scale, but you can blow through money very quickly. Got you. And so like the offline, would that be considered going and using whatever software to find vacant or distressed properties and then trying to then contact, reach out to the owner of the property or the next to Kent? So what we started to look into last summer was, you know, a lot of people don't do offline very efficiently. And we decided that our ROI by going after every sort of absentee owner or every high equity seller was not very good in northern Virginia. I mean, we're getting results, but if you want a wholesale 30, 40, 50 deals a month, you probably don't want to blow your money. You know, hitting every high equity seller. So what we started to do was really refine the data in the markets that we're doing offline. So we're we're getting these essentially motivation type lists, whether it's tax delinquents, code violations, divorce, bankruptcy, all these different sort of niche lists. And when you start to look at niche lists and see where your buy box fits, that's everything you have to have a buy box. So as a company, you have to know what you're going to buy. And what we realized last summer was in our buy box, in our offline markets, there was really only out of out of a county that is say 95,000 records. There was really only about 6000 that had some serious motivation and about 1200 that have massive, massive motivation. So we don't waste our time on all 95,000 records in a given county anymore. We focus on the on the 1200 really, really niche ones. We focus on those heavily. And on the 6000 ones, we do like a little a softer touch. And that sort of is how we've scaled our offline into three markets right now. If that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Would you say the days of driving for dollars and mailing postcards? Is that is that a thing of the past? I mean, there's still some pretty large institutions out here that are offering those services. I mean, have you guys seen much traction with doing that? Or are you even still doing that? So I would say that offline deals are much better in terms of margin than online. What we've seen on the online deals is the margin is 10 to 40 K on average, most of them being the 10 to 15 range. And our offline deals here in Northern Virginia are much bigger spreads. So those can be like 30 to 70 K, depending where it is and what it is and the price point. If you're done like 10 percent is like a wholesale fee and the houses are like 70, 700, 800,000, you know, that's a 70, 80 K wholesale Simon. If the market is, you know, it's that type of market. What I would tell you is that for the offline stuff, direct mail, SMS, cold calling, those are still the same mechanisms in play. We're still doing for all of our offline stuff. We're doing direct mail. We're doing SMS. We're doing cold calling. We're doing with high frequency and then and then online. Of course, you're not doing any of that stuff. But but I think a business has to have a mix of both. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess, yeah, it's the it's the finding out which tools work best in each scenario. So your northern Virginia market is going to be drastically different than Hampton Roads down near Virginia Beach, I would assume, as far as you're a hundred percent. Yeah. Right. Right. The other thing that we started to do a lot since last August, which has made a huge difference is we track my lead manager tracks every text messages that goes out, every call that goes out, every mail that goes out. He tracks what happens to those marketing messages. Do we get a response? Is it a good response? Is it a bad response? Is it a good phone number? Is it a bad phone number? Did the text work or is it the wrong person? We track everything. And then at the end of the month, every month, we're looking at, you know, what happened to these different campaigns? Do we reach them? Do we not reach them? Is it a good number? Is it a bad number? And what we found actually is that some of these people that are impossible to reach and we know at the end of each month, who they are, if they're impossible to reach, focusing on those people is where the gold could be in your campaigns. So if like you touched a certain individual on phone and text and direct mail and they didn't respond on taking the next step, so actually have someone here that her whole role is just investigating those particular records, how can I find those people? You know, whether it's on Family Tree now or getting their relative or whoever, figuring out who those people are that you're not reaching, there's gold in those in those in those records. Yeah, I mean, I remember years ago doing some of the like driving for dollars, you know, mail campaigns and when the mail would come back returned, everyone would say, dude, that's a bucket of gold. If it's an absentee owner and the mail gets returned, you need to start, you know, skip tracing that even further. Yeah, right. Yeah, and I mean, we've already found it. I mean, there's a delay period. So what I would also say is like, I was actually just discussing this morning with my acquisition manager and he came to the same conclusion. I mean, the average offline deal is on average two to three months from first touch to close. And the average online deal, be it lower margin is, you know, one to three weeks, maybe less. So it's going to take you longer to get that offline deal. But if you're touching people that no one else has touched before, like this little hidden gold, there's going to be huge profits in those type of deals potentially. Yeah, are there any, are there any markets that you're not considering? So when we started this venture out last summer, we ended up aligning essentially with where it took some time. So at that time, we knew about two or three hedge funds at that time. Now we have about eight or nine, maybe 10 that we're working with regularly. And when we overlaid where all these hedge funds are buying that we know of currently that we have relationships with early fall, we decided those are the 18 markets we really wanted to focus on. But of course, I think what's key for any business is to track your results. So now we've been tracking those results for six months now and we're realizing certain markets are working and certain markets are not. Certain markets, you know, are more competitive than others. We're not getting the margins we need to get. We're paying too much for the deal and not getting enough spread on the out sale. So you get all this like all these metrics as you analyze your business. I think what we're realizing in the last couple of weeks now is that there's probably three or four markets in particular that have performed really well for us. And about I would say about 50 percent of our business currently is selling the hedge funds directly. So basically you're shopping knowing what your buyer, your end buyer wants. You know, you know, specific areas, you know, the criteria. Do let me ask, I mean, for some of these hedge funds, do they I'm sure every deal is different, but do they care of the condition? I'm sure that so each hedge fund has their own business model, too, which is also kind of interesting. And there's different sizes of hedge funds as well. Some are some are way more sophisticated than others. The one in our pipeline that I think they're going to go to probably a million units under under management in the next five years. Their process is really down pat. And what I would tell you is their buy box is really specific. So for example, they won't go to a high crime neighborhood. They won't go to a zip code that has household income less than 35,000. They won't go more than 25 miles from a major city market. They won't go to almost any place outside the Sunbelt or like the South. There's only really about 10 metro regions that have high growth that they'll even consider. But if you get a deal in that market that fits the buy box, they're paying basically a 6 percent cap rate. Essentially, the cap rates are computed on all in basis. So it's the purchase price plus whatever cap X they need to put in. To get the deal up to modern living standards. If you can get that at a six cap within 25, 30 miles of a major metro, they'll buy it at a six cap. If you're like, if you're in like a bigger suburb of a major metro, that could be 30 minutes out and it's still like considered part of the same market, they'll probably pay a seven cap. So essentially you end up somewhere between a six and a seven cap rate. And the only exception to that one is Miami. I know a hedge fund buyer right now in Miami that will pay 5.37 percent cap all in basis. So essentially you're running your numbers based on cash on cash return or cash flow for these hedge fund buyers for most of them. And obviously, with you explaining it that way, these hedge funds are doing these for buying holds. Exactly. Yeah, because I had a scenario, different little different topic, scenario on a flip that I did about a year ago and our end buyer came in with an all cash offer with an inspect basic inspection clause, nothing major. It was an all cash offer from a company in Chicago. But that actually, that was the buyer, but that really wasn't going to be the occupant. So this, this company, which I now know is back in the day, this company, which I now know is backed by a large hedge fund, they buy properties, like you said, close to major cities. We were in PG County with this property just outside of D.C. And they already had a person willing to purchase the property on the lease option. So they bought it, title went in their name, and they did it basically sold it to her on a rent to own program. Have you seen or experienced any of that with some of your guys? None of ours are doing that. So you have to understand, like I started to look into this because honestly, like our next iteration of our company is going to be opening up three-step holdings next summer. And what we're looking at doing is we understand the buy boxes now of a lot of these different hedge funds. We understand like what constitutes a deal and what doesn't. We have gone through enough deals. I think that we see where the problem areas lie. I mean, even in Texas, for example, like foundation problems are very common and in Florida, sinkholes are very common. So you see all these different issues with different markets. And I think we've realized what we want and what we don't want to buy. That's a great thing about being a wholesale, by the way, is learning what works and what doesn't. But at the same time, we've also been investigating how are these companies doing what they're doing? So to give you an example, I mean, one of these hedge funds is buying 40 deals a month, 50 deals a month in, you know, 14 or 16 different markets. That's like almost a thousand properties or more a month. So we looked at how are they funding it and how are they able to pay with their pain? And what we found was that some of them are getting $500 million every six months. And it comes in tranches of money where the first tranche is like a 1.75 percent interest rate and they're getting 95 percent leverage. So they're going out and buying like thousands of properties with 5 percent down with blended rates of somewhere in the mid-twos. And that's how they're able to pay with their pain and make tremendous cash on cash returns, even at a six cap. And now, so for example, like a lot of deals right now that we're selling, I mean, Zillow might be like 2.30 or you might say the ARV is like 2.40 and they're willing to pay all in like 2.10 if it's the right market. And so a lot of us here in the D.C. Metro market or maybe even in other markets, we feel like that's a retail deal like that. Like, Josh, that's a retail deal. Like, how is that even a deal? And these guys are paying it. Like, if you know how to underwrite the deal based on how they look at the numbers, I mean, it could look to an outside investor like it's a retail deal. Mm hmm. Yeah. Is it so are you familiar with like Fundrise and some of those crowdfunding type of basically they they operate as a brokerage and you can like invest your retirement account with them or, you know, cash with them, whatever. And they pay like a like a nine to 12 percent quarterly dividend is what they pay out. Are these guys doing anything? I don't think any of our clients are doing that. They're literally going to banks in Wall Street that are like not the traditional bank that most of us are aware of. It's it's like these sort of maybe in Wall Street, you would know the banks, but to us, like, you know, you're on the street, like I've never heard these companies before. But blended rates is in the mid twos is what they're getting from these type of banks in Wall Street. About. Wow. This is a lot of money out there that a lot of us never knew about, huh? There's a ton of money chasing deals. And I think the thing is like I took so many different trainings last year during during covid. One of them was with Kent Clothier. And I mean, when you talk about going to the biggest buyers, Kent Clothier says that if you're a wholesaler, one client who buys 10 deals a year will make you a hundred thousand dollars for the year. Right. So you need 10 clients who are going to buy 10 deals a year to make a million bucks if you're a wholesaler. Well, he didn't even consider the fact that what if you had 10 hedge fund buyers that are each buying 30 or 40 houses a month, you know, nine hundred thousand, two thousand houses a year each. So if you want to align with the biggest buyers through the easiest to deal with, as a wholesaler, we only care about two things. Like, do they have the cash to perform and how quickly can they close? Like a lot of us always talk about cash conversion cycle. And that's what always like crushed me in the building business because we take on a new single family home project would go on for nine or 12 months. It would take nine to 12 months to get a paycheck. And at the end of it, you're like, great, we made 150 grand or 200 grand. But over 12 months, that was like 15 or 16 K a month. I mean, you can sell a wholesale deal to hedge fund. They'll literally close in two weeks. No questions asked if you did your numbers right. I mean, we could be getting paid 14 days from now if we did our numbers right with no questions asked. Five K deposit, non-refundable. Wow. So I look at that business model and compare to like what we used to do. I mean, the conversion cycles, it's no comparison. Yeah. So you just mentioned that. So you guys are using your own your own cash, let's say, to put down earnest money to hold the deal and shop it to your you then shop it to your wholesaler that you likely already know because of the criteria, which guy you're going to. Exactly. So we'll know we pretty much know at this point it's taking a little bit of time to really figure everything out. But once it hits our underwriting department, our underwriter knows like, OK, do I underwrite this deal as a hedge fund deal because it has this buy box? Or is it if it's not a hedge fund deal, then we go to this underwriting criteria. So if it's a hedge fund deal, like we're going to stick with that focus initially. And if it doesn't fit the buy box, then we fall back. And if it doesn't fit the buy box, then we're falling back on software like. So my co-host on deal imagination and Robert Wensley, he invented a platform called investor lift. Investor lift tracks two to two and a half million buyers nationwide right now of all levels. So it scores the buyers based on how many deals they've done. So we know if it doesn't fit the hedge fund buy box, we fall back on a buyer in that platform who, you know, they might be scored between three thousand and ten thousand, which means they're not doing their first deal. They're probably not even doing their second deal, but they've done some amount of deals, but they're nowhere near a hedge fund. So that's sort of the buyer that we fall back to. OK, so you actually you have a buyer list as well, not just these hedge funds that are trying to do multiples. You're building your own private list as well. So through the investor lift enterprise plan, which was like 10 grand a month, I think now we're actually introducing entry level entry level subscriptions for like beginning and sort of medium level wholesalers through that platform. You can actually see like two million buyers nationwide of all levels. You're not going to see a lot of the hedge funds in there. Very few of them, actually. But you're going to see like the Josh Cohen's of the world that they did their 15 or 20 flips last year. I mean, if you looked me up in Falls Church on that platform, you'll actually be able to see exactly what deals I did the last 12 or 24 months. So and not only that, you can skip trace me in there and find my cell phone. So if you wanted to connect with somebody like a Josh Cohen type of buyer in Orlando or San Antonio or Memphis and if it doesn't fit, in my opinion, if it doesn't fit the hedge fund box, now you go look for like the Josh Cohen or or Chris Birch in San Antonio through this investor platform and find them. Got you. What is I'm going to put it up here on the screen. What is how could they find that? So they can actually it's on my Facebook page. If they sign up through Josh Cohen, dot investor lift dot com, I'll get a massive discount on their entry. All right. Yeah, I'll copy that link and then I'll put it in the description of this video. So when people go back and watch it, they can then click through your link. If folks are having trouble with this point deals, I mean, it's probably the best software in the business right now, hands down for finding buyers. Well, just not the hedge fund buyers at the moment. OK, with with your wholesaling stuff, are you guys finding any way of putting stuff just on the regular market, MLS market, or you're not even looking at that side anymore? You know, we've heard like those type of techniques, like novation and these type of things. But at the end of the day, like to me, like we're just in the business of scaling right now. So what I struggle with in building was that there was there was always too many different pieces going on. There was always another headache that was happening or another fire to put out. And when you start to have a business that's sort of newer like we are, that's now like trying to do too many different things, the process becomes confusing. So to be honest with you, our process right now is very specific. Like the deal comes in, this happens, that happens, this happens. It underwrites like that. And it either closes in two weeks with this or closes in four weeks with that. Our business model is very particular. I think it's hard to scale otherwise because you have all these other distractions and it becomes like everyone gets distracted, like, how do I deal with this? How do I deal with that? I think one of the things that I think a lot of investors get wrong is not keeping the business simplified. It's either A, B or C. So we're just trying to get, honestly, I see a lot of folks posting big numbers. But the end of the day, like what you really want to think about is what are your big numbers that are closing this month? We don't we don't care like what you're closing next month or three months from now. What is the business generating this month alone in closed revenue? And you can't do that with all these different techniques. So like for us, it's like we want to have no more than two to four week close in and out and move on to the next. So you mentioned you you're underwriting in house. Are you doing in house as well? Say that again. I said, are you doing title work in house as well? No, no, no, no, we've aligned with about three different title companies that cover most of our markets. And that's how we're sort of doing that process as well. So a lot of I'm sure as a wholesaler, you're never at the settlement table anyways, or normally not anyways. With it being virtual, you're you're doing eSigns and if they need wet signatures, your FedEx and stuff, you know, back to your whatever title companies closing in that market. Yeah, we're never showing up. Our transaction coordinator is sending out the LLC docs, the the the earnest money deposits, giving us giving the wire instructions to get our money back in. Actually, a lot of things that we're working on for this next iteration of InvestorLift, version 11, that's going to have like the operational stuff built into it, where like everything that happens after you sign a contract. A lot of folks don't have that as like a process. And we struggled actually with that the last seven months. Like where do we find a system that can manage the process from deal under contract to actually getting paid? Because you know, all these things are going to happen between deal under contract and actually getting a check. And how do you manage that whole process? There's really not a good platform out there right now to do that. What we ended up doing the last three or four months was building a custom Dispo platform in Monday.com. So we have our own sort of Monday.com setup where we we track buyers with deals, we track every stage of what's happening in the deal right now. We have conversations going on with what title companies work in the deal, what their comments are when we last talked to them. That operational standpoint of doing deals, though, there's not a good platform right now in the marketplace that manages that pipeline, though, in my opinion. Yeah, I mean, a lot of them are kind of a cookie cutter. But as you said, similar to the redesigning of your website, it doesn't have everything. So you're now kind of forced to maybe use some of these as your template. But then you need to add on certain features that some of these bigger, bigger sourcing companies are not the lead generating are not thinking about. I mean, to be honest with you, like there's so many coaches out there and everybody talks a big story. But at the end of the day, like if you really want to grow a business and I think next month or probably quarter to but by the time we start this business next summer, we'll be hitting seven figures a month. So within 12 months or less, our business will have gone from zero to seven figures a month. And unfortunately, I don't think, in my opinion, there's any one coaching program you can point to and say, like, hey, if I did that, I'll be at seven figures a month in 12 months from now. You kind of have to have your business model figured out and you have to iterate it, you know, as quickly as possible to scale it up. Yeah, but unfortunately, every aspect of our business right now, there hasn't been a piece of software that you could point to and say, like, that does everything we need. Even in our acquisition CRM, we used Podio for a while for many years as a builder, but what we realized was Podio doesn't cut it anymore for what we're trying to do. So our new acquisition CRM that we're using, we have all these like custom automations built out for email introduction with video. We have text message, text message follow-ups going out automatically. We've all these automations built out that you're just not going to find that in some turnkey platform the way you need it, in my opinion. So across your entire business from lead gen acquisitions to TC to Dispo, you kind of you have to make the business your own and figure out what it's going to take to really scale it. Like, where do you fit in? What does your business do exactly? And all your software, all your training, all your people, all sort of have to be tailored to basically that model. Got you. So as you as you expand, actually, not even let's rewind a little. As you were starting to scale, do you have boots on the ground in these markets? Are you literally are you scraping data in markets where you know your buyers want to buy? So in our offline markets, we do have boots on the ground. But in our online markets, we do not necessarily by any means. One of the things that we thought about last summer was if we're really going to grow this, we're going to go we've been saying we're going to go to the road to one million a month. That's been our motto since the beginning. You know, they say if you say things enough times, you'll actually make it happen. And I think we're making it happen. So from the beginning, we thought last summer that we needed to have people on the ground. That was our original thought. Like, yeah, we did this deal in Orlando in June. May 30 grand. But are we really going to make it happen consistently? So around September or August, we sent three people down to Orlando. They're still down there full time. That's one of our other boots on the ground markets where we have people that can go to appointments or whatnot if we have to. But looking back on it, I mean, at the end of the day, how deep is the motivation to sell really? If the motivation is really deep to sell and we satisfy all their needs, then we may not necessarily need anyone on the ground. And that's sort of what we found over the last four or five months that, you know, it feels like having a crutch to know that you have someone on the ground in the market, but it's not really necessary 100 percent. Yeah. Well, I guess it it does help because you're not necessarily doing market research because your buyer is already telling you where they want to buy. Correct. Right. So then you're you're scrubbing a specific zip code in a specific neighborhood of that zip code where your your hedge fund buyers are already looking to buy X amount of properties. It's definitely more problematic for the buyers that are not hedge funds because, you know, hedge funds are very professional. They do things a certain way. They schedule their inspection. They give you a report if you have that relationship. If it's not a hedge fund buyer, which is the other 50 percent of our buyer pool right now, it is a little bit more complicated because you don't know exactly the track record of that buyer, what their what their behavior is going to be like. Are they really going to have good integrity? Put the deposits in right away. Are we just going to play games for the next two weeks with them? Yeah. It is a little bit more challenging when it's not a hedge fund buyer. But in that circumstance, we're getting videos, not usually not videos. We're getting pictures from the seller as often as we can. Or if not, we're going through our network and trying to find somebody in our network that we know in that market to help us out if we need it. Yeah. So like in our northern Virginia D.C. market, there are a bunch of companies that are similar to, you know, what you're doing as a wholesaler, maybe not as well structured because I'm on all their emails as a buyer as well. For for the private buyers, is there a way that they can sign up to become one to get on to your buyer list? I mean, I know you're building it, but absolutely. So if they if they hit up sales at three step home sale.com, they'll be able to get on our list and somebody will reach out and talk to them about, you know, what their criteria is and that sort of thing. I just wanted to add that on there for them. I forgot to turn our phone system off. They're they're still calling right now. Yeah, access home. I definitely like going by the last summer, like we're definitely like we feel like a startup company. Like it's almost like we we threw everything out and became a startup company overnight. But I mean, you basically have to build everything back from ground zero in every respect and gear it sort of, you know, if you previously were doing a business like we were that was doing one or two deals a month. How do you take that to 30 or 40 deals a month? Yeah, you need new phone systems. You need new CRM, you need new automations. You need new training manuals. You need new process for everybody. I probably spent a month where I was up till 2 a.m. in the morning, 3 a.m. in the morning just drawing like process maps for each department. You know, if this happens, do that. If that happens, do this. If this happens, do this. It definitely you need a lot of structure and training and process. And if you skip that step, everything just falls apart. Yeah. Yeah. Are you using a lot of virtual assistance and other implementation as well? We do have a certain layer of virtual assistance. They fall more in the lead generation component of our business right now. They're usually what? The first touch? The first touch, exactly. Okay. So, which is the other thing to think about as a business owner too, which I didn't give as much thought to this as I should have six months ago. Like, if you think of real estate as like that first touch to the close, you know, whatever happens in the earlier steps affects what happens later on. So, if like your process is breaking down in lead gen or acquisitions, if anything happens in there that's not quite right, those problems are going to propagate through all the way to disposition and closing. For example, like if your contracts, for example, if you're signing up contracts and a lot of folks right now have tenants in their property and there's no, let's say you sign up contracts and half of them have tenants and there's no expectation like when the tenant's leaving, what their current lease agreement is, what they're paying, do they have a security deposit, how much is it. If you don't have all this stuff figured out in the contract with the seller, how do you dispose you like that? Like these problems go from a smaller magnitude to a massive magnitude because now the buyer is like, hey, Josh, you guys are selling us a deal that's vacant on the 30th and now there's a tenant inside and the seller's saying you took it as is and what's this about a security deposit and an escrow holdback. Whatever problems you have in your process early on are magnified by the time you get to the end. And we've started really looking at all those different details the last six months to figure out what's causing holdups in our business. Yeah, cool. We got a comment here, unbelievable. Yeah, tell me about it. So Josh, I don't know if you know this. Do you know how your buyers are getting their loans? It's all Wall Street funded. So 95% leverage blended rates, two and a half. Essentially, if you look at a very high level, I mean, they're probably getting cash on cash returns for their investors at like 12 to 14 or 15%. So if they buy from us at a six cap and they borrow 95% at say two and a half, they're getting like cash on cash like 15 plus percent return. And I think that 5% that they're putting down, no question they're raising that money from some probably accredited investors or something. Because even if they pay those accredited investors say 10% cash on cash, I mean, that's great return for both their investor and them. Yeah. But yeah, there's a lot of money just free flowing in the marketplace right now. It's wild. So without giving any of your secret, as far as market expansion, what region in the country are you guys focusing on? So for three step holdings, which is going to launch, we want to own and it's really for no particular reason. We want to own in North Carolina. One of the bigger reasons is because I know from owning property over the years, you don't want to be 3000 miles away. So we're like a four hour drive to most of these markets, maybe five hours to Greensboro and Raleigh and some of these other markets, Fayetteville. So we want to own in North Carolina. So that's on the map for three step holdings to take down deals in the near future. As far as wholesaling deals to hedge fund buyers, we really like Florida. We really like Georgia. We really like South Carolina. We like Ohio. We like Indiana. We like Oklahoma. We like Arizona. A lot of the Sunbelt States are really good markets right now. Tennessee is really good as well. And now a year ago, we might not have said this, but understanding wholesaling completely different from this, are you seeing as a former real estate investor flipper, what do you think is going to happen with this foreclosure market? Do you have any perspective on that? And I think it's not going to be like 2008, 2009. There's going to be some, but I just want to get your perspective on that. So internally, we meet as a company once a week and internally what we're talking about on our Monday morning meetings is that we're starting to see pre foreclosures right now trickle in. We're starting to see pre foreclosures trickle in from the Carolinas down to Florida, down to Texas. But the big difference between, and I've seen a lot of folks talk about this, Ken McElroy, by the way, is a great resource. I recommend you guys soak everything Ken McElroy says, like a sponge. I'm very in agreement with his philosophy right now. You've got a million units at Mentory Nationwide, two months supply. You've got 3.6 million units that are in default. A million of those are in major default on their loans. You've got 8.6 million landlords that are trying to evict that, just like we have struggled on some of our cases, we actually have a case that's about to close next week or two weeks from now. It's taken 12 months to evict the tenant who hasn't lived in the property, by the way, for three years and hasn't paid in five years, took over a year to evict that tenant. You've got 8.6 million people like that nationwide right now that, and a lot of them maybe haven't even gotten a payment in months. It could even be a year. I think if you look about it, you need 2.7 million units active to be sort of a healthy market. That's a million.7 units above where we stand today. But keep in mind, we have 3.6 in default and 8.6 depending eviction. So if we even add 2 million units to the active inventory, the dynamic of this market could change very quickly. I'm not saying that it will. Nobody knows. The elephant in the room is how the government responds. I don't think our president wants to see 8.6 million people on the street. I don't think he wants to see 3.5 million people go through foreclosure. There might be a lot of workouts or loan modifications that are going to happen the next nine months. But there definitely are pre-foreclosures happening right now. The big difference between now and 2008, a lot of us remember that. It was really rough time. For a lot of investors, to be honest with you, if you're under 40, a lot of you guys have never experienced a market that was a strong buyer's market. And if the rug were ever to get pulled out from under you and you felt what that pressure feels like, and honestly, most of you guys have not, it's a very different environment, extremely different environment to be working in. So let's hope that doesn't happen. But keep in mind, interest rates have ticked up 3.25% in the last three weeks. It's the biggest increase in 10 years. Money at the end of the day controls the real estate market. So follow the money first. But I do think the difference between then and now is that your average homeowner has massive equity in their home. And so even if they're going to go through pre-foreclosure, which I do think there are going to be pre-foreclosures, no question, they're not going to have short sale situation so much. It's going to be, can you work out the deal with these sellers in pre-foreclosure? And that's what we're doing right now already. I expect to see a lot more of that in the next 12 months, 18 months. But yeah, get to the sellers first, because short sale, having to deal with a negotiation with the bank, I don't think that's going to happen this time around. Yeah. And with a short sale, you don't know when it's ever going to close. Your choice, it's not your seller's choice. It's literally the lender agreeing to it. And can you imagine the volume of what they might be dealing with? You know, they know, they know who has not been paying for the last 12 months. But I do want to add this, because I also see this working the markets we're in. Ken McElroy says that the recovery will be uneven. Some markets like Northern Virginia will remain on fire. And other markets, it could be like Texas, could go through some of the markets in Texas, not all of Texas, like Austin's a very tech heavy market. But other markets like a San Antonio or a Tulsa may really struggle. I mean, we already have really high pre-foreclosure rates over there. We have really high eviction rates. The economy's laid off more people than the average in the country. So I think certain pockets like a Fayetteville could have really high distress the next 12 to 18 months. But at the same time, a market like Northern Virginia, you could be fighting over 30 other people for the same deal. Yeah. Yeah. Well, as I always say, you look up and you're like, we've been on here an hour already. But is there any like some key, let's say, key points or strategies that you guys are using that you can share with like the younger investor? And then also, how that younger investor maybe gets a hold of you. Maybe they have a deal that they can't, they have it under contract. They don't have a buyer or they don't know how to find a buyer. Are you guys offering that service to? Yeah. So actually, like you were saying, like I'm trying not to do too many different things, but as of about a couple of months ago, we introduced a JV program because we realized we didn't have the process to deal with joint ventures that were coming into our plate. Now we do. A joint venture actually comes in. It goes right to our underwriting desk. We underwrite the deal just as if it was any other deal. And we tell you what we think either if we're going to buy it, we'll tell you what we'll pay. Or if we have another hedge fund or bigger buyer or any buyer that will buy it, we'll tell you what they'll pay. But yeah, we do have a process right now that deals with JVs. And actually, one of my friends here in Northern Virginia was trying to do a deal. Tony, shout out to Tony Johnson. Tony was trying to do a deal for over a year. And we made it happen. He got his first deal done for the first time in Arlington and it closed two weeks ago. The guy made 14 grand. And pretty straightforward deal. So 14 grand his first deal. And now he's looking at three or four others at the moment that we're underwriting with him as well. So yeah, if you guys have deals that you want help on or need help on, just let us know what you need. You can also reach out to sales at threestephomesale.com as well for that. Yeah, let me put that up again. But yeah, I mean, there's so much money to be made out there right now that I mean, some people look at this business like I need to get everything. And this is a business where a piece of something is better than zero. So we're not greedy. Like we're looking to get something just for our efforts. But we'll make it happen if we can for anyone who's out there listening. Gotcha. If the right deal came across your plate, would you go back to the flip in this market right now? Absolutely. So we'd only go back to the flip if it's like a 30 to 60 day window. And we're actually seeing some of those like that right now. I believe we're going to take down about two or three deals in Virginia next month, strictly because we believe we can get in and out in two to three months or less. But if the window is going to be more than two to three months, we're not going to do it. We're looking more like the hedge fund model where we just want to deploy cash and have the easiest methodology possible. You know, hedge funds, they look at the property. If it's more than cosmetic, they pass. If they know it's going to be more than 30 days of work, it's not for them. Because all they really want to do, if you think about it, they want to deploy as much capital as quickly as possible with the least amount of headache. And I'll leave you guys with a final thought on this. I mean, I got into investing in 2009 not to lift a hammer and chase contractors around the Home Depot and gotten by toilets. You know, that wasn't why I got into this business. And, you know, luxury building sounds great like selling million-dollar homes. It looks sexy on Facebook. It sounds great. But at the end of the day, it was really hard to scale that business because there was always headaches coming up all the time. And I couldn't compensate people very well. So, I mean, our highest-paid individual in the company last year was probably in the low six figures. But that's how the building business is. And this year, our highest employees are going to make two to three times that, if not more. I mean, our top employees could make a half a million this year easily. So, compare making half a million working here to barely getting over six figures. I mean, the two businesses are not the same. And it's hard to keep good talent if you can't even pay them good wages. So, like in this business, we can pay good wages. We can grow. It's a win for everybody. Going back to the original point, though, I got in this business not to have, you know, this massively stressful active income job. I think all of us get into this to have passive income. And I think I got sidetracked for six years chasing sexy million-dollar homes and not thinking that the end goal was really to have passive income. And I think it really comes down to two things. I'm 40 years old now, so I'm not a young investor anymore. But if I started over again, I would think about it like this. You want to have the highest active income with the least resistance as quickly as possible. And you want to take that money and you want to put it into passive investments that are going to make money whether you work or you don't around the clock and even when you retire and it's going to create generational wealth. So, if you're not able to do that with your current role, whatever active income you have, and our previous business wasn't doing that for anyone, our current business is find something that gives you the active income to reinvest and get passive results. Because that's why all of us got into real estate in the first place. Not to chase guys at Home Depot, not to swing a hammer 60 hours a week, not to, you know, pick out bathroom vanities, not to do any of that. And you can't scale a business to a massive level if that's what your day-to-day looks like either. So, my tips are pick one market that you think is going to have the stress in the next 12 months. And there's a lot of them out there. I mentioned a few today already on the show. I mean Fayetteville, San Antonio, Memphis, pick one market out there that you think is going to have the stress. And if you already have a good active income and that's a market where you think you want to buy and hold, then look at it from a buy and hold perspective. But if you don't have an active income, look at it from, I'm going to generate wholesale income from this market. And I'm going to take that money when the market bottoms, and I'm going to reinvest it over here. So, pick a market that meets whatever your investment objectives are. And there's a lot of them out there right now that are going to do that. I think a good seller avatar, honestly, is going to be landlords, landlord sellers. Those are going to be a hot, hot item. And it's going to come down to how do you present yourself to those people? Are you providing a solution? Are you establishing credibility? Do they like you? Are you personable? Landlord sellers are going to be the biggest thing out there, so pick those in the right market. And I think you've got a golden goose. Yeah, I have a buddy who he does some wholesaling, but he was sharing a strategy with me on how he targets a landlord. And it was completely free. He literally goes on Zillow, chooses a zip code, chooses for rent, and goes to the oldest listings. Right? Yep. Trying to rent it for the last 12 months, nobody's rented it. Usually, it's a private owner that lists their personal number on there and he calls them. And I said, well, what happens when they get upset? And he said, well, my pitch is would you consider selling? And normally, the buyer, I mean, excuse me, the owner will say, no, I'm not selling this property. He says, oh, great. Would you be interested in buying more in the same neighborhood if I have other properties? I just thought it was so smart, like he just turned it around where he didn't offend the owner. The owner said, no, I don't want to sell it. I don't care if I rent it or not. And turned it around and now he added a brand new buyer to his list just by saying, would you be interested in more in that same area? No, I think that's a great strategy, honestly. And I think, honestly, when a lot of your viewers go out and try to do this, there's going to be fear. I mean, we personally had a lot of fear last summer and I've been in the business for a long time and it scared myself. You're going to have fear. You're going to have doubts. Is what Josh is really saying on here, can I, you know, Bob Jones who lives out in San Diego, can I really wholesale or buy and hold a deal in, you know, Memphis, Tennessee, 2,000 miles away, not even knowing anybody over there. You're going to have doubts. You're going to have fear. It actually does work. If you guys need help, I encourage you to reach out. Our team, we have phenomenal people in our company from the acquisitions, Richard Cranich down to dispositions, Roger to our underwriting, Helen, you know, all the positions in our company, they're going to help you if you need help. So if it's a fear thing, don't let fear stop you is what I would tell you. There's so many deals out there. There's too many deals for one person to take down. So don't let that stop you. And the other thing is recession pending or not pending. There's one cure for real estate and that's what a lot of us in the Northern Virginia DMV market forget because a lot of us are just developing property here. We don't buy and hold a whole lot because the numbers don't work. In other markets, most investors look for cash flow. And cash flow is something that in most respects, tends to be more recession proof if you do your numbers right. If you buy the deal at the right price and get the right cash flow going in, it's pretty hard to lose if your timeframe is 5, 7, 10 years. So don't let fear stop you because the market might come down in six months or oh, there might be a lot of distress. Get out there, underwrite the deals based on cash flow. If you don't know how to reach out to us, there's so many folks out there with money to go around that want to buy deals that can get a good return. Based on cash flow, not equity. Yep, no doubt. I have friends in different markets that literally cash flow only two or 300 bucks a month on property, but they're only in the whole deal for 30 grand. It's wild, man. I'll give you guys an example. So we locked up a deal on Friday yesterday. It's in Terrahot, Indiana. I don't know if you guys even know where that is. About two hours west of Indianapolis. It's a 2,800 square foot house. There's a duplex down the street. It's three blocks from Indiana State University. And it's five blocks from Major Hospital Center. And there's student housing in the neighborhood. How much do you think the guy wanted for this deal? It's 2,800 square foot, five minutes to Indiana State University, which is a pretty big campus, and five minutes the other direction to Major Hospital. A duplex was 120 for two units renovated. Each unit rents for about 1,000 a month. How much do you think this deal is? I'm a low-ball it and say 60. Asking price 25,000. So don't let fear stop you guys. There's deals everywhere. There's deals out there everywhere. If it's not in your backyard, you know, get out beyond your backyard. You know, when we got out of the DC market last summer and I saw it was out there in the rest of the country, it opened up a whole new universe to us. And I was like, man, we thought so small for so many years. We let like whatever was within five miles away dictate our future. Don't don't be like that. If it's 3,000 miles away, let that dictate your future because there's more deals out there 3,000 miles away than there are five miles away. And you're probably just keeping yourself down by doing what we used to do. Yeah, but you would have never found that deal if you didn't call them and ask the question. Yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously you did your research to find the property and the, you know, all that stuff, but you're not going to know until you open your mouth. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, I think the one thing I can say is that people overthink the business. You know, it's literally a conversation with a seller. If it's in a really very basic level, your acquisitions guys, they're having a conversation with a seller, figuring out what the motivation is. If there's any, do they really want to sell? What the timeframe looks like? Do they have a price in mind they want to take? I mean, a lot of folks just overthink this. And if you overthink it, you become your biggest enemy. Yeah. And you won't know until you ask like, okay, you want 30 grand, will you take 25? You want 50, will you take 40? You won't know until you ask. I mean, your level of skill will improve over the years. I've been at this 12 years now. Your level of skill is going to go up. You're going to study, but you're not going to know everything in the beginning. And if you try to be perfect out of the gate, you won't get started. So don't get perfect out of the gate. Just get going, fumble through it, figure it out, call us if you need to, but make some money because there's so much money out there right now to be made. So much money. Yeah. I mean, as you said, if you're afraid to go do it, fine. Email them. If they see a deal, they'll do a joint venture with you. They'll close the person and you'll still earn a commission. You know? Why not? I mean, who doesn't like to earn like Tony did 14 grand in less than a month? I mean, the money's out there. It's just people getting their own way. But I guess that's a basic steps. Pick a market, talk to sellers, pick sellers that are likely to sell. I think landlords are your best ones right now. Markets like, for example, there's a county outside Phoenix. 10% of that market is landlords. So 10% of the inventory in that county outside Phoenix is landlords and 5% are in pre foreclosure. So go where the deals are. Don't just be where you try to make a deal. That's my philosophy. We go where the deals are right now. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy, man. Well, Josh, I really, really truly appreciate it. I'm sure with your crew and the information we're sharing here, probably motivated a few people to say, boom, I actually need to go stop neglecting everything. I just need to go do it. And I think that's where we both are with it. Honestly, the more I look back on real estate, real estate is a team sport. And people try to keep it all close to the chest. But real estate is a team sport. If you don't go into your network and let your network help you, you're only going to make so much. But if you reach out to your network and ask for help, you're going to go a lot further. I guarantee you. Yeah, yeah, no doubt. All right, man. That's all I have for you. I really do appreciate it, guys. I'm going to give it to you one more time. Email if you want to get in contact with them. If you have a deal, you might already have it under contract, but you're not sure how to close on it. These guys would be more than willing to help you do it. They already have buyers in tow and they're ready to move. So, Josh, without further ado, man, I really appreciate it. Chris, I appreciate you having me on here. And do you have any sort of mail or promotions you want to talk about for investors that are out there doing mailers or postcards or whatnot? Yep, great point. So we actually have two different packages. If you go to, what is it, createdc.com and just search real estate. There's two different packages on there for investors. It's a business card, postcard and a door hanger package. So I've done it. I use it all the time. Certain neighborhoods, when I was driving for dollars, even if the house looked unoccupied, I still had my business card and or a door hanger. I'd go put it on the front door of the house and I would literally get calls back. Sometimes it's some older gentleman cursing me out saying, no, I don't want to say that. But maybe he did want to sell. I wouldn't have known if I hadn't given him that door hanger just to say, hey, we're in the area. We love buying in this neighborhood. If you're interested in selling, we'd love to make you an all cash offer, simple, sweet stuff. Yeah. I mean, Chris, you never know which marketing medium is going to catch that seller at the right time. It's like people ask what works. The reality is that all works. Yeah. I get text messages from other cash buyers. I live in a neighborhood with high equity and I got a text the other day, someone saying, hey, we're buying in your neighborhood. We want to offer you all cash. Well, I responded. How much are you offering? And I'm also an investor. What software are you using? They didn't respond to me. But I'm like, that's pretty cool. Your text came through and said, my first and last name had the property address. And can we spend five minutes on the phone and talk about buying your house? Yeah. I'll listen to anybody making me an offer. That doesn't mean I have to do it. You actually brought me to one last point. A lot of people try to close the deal with their marketing. And unfortunately, that's what kills everything. Like your marketing, your mail piece, your text, whatever that is, that's just to set up your introduction. That's it. You can't be trying to close on your marketing medium. You just want to get your foot in the door. That's it. Yeah. I mean, some of the larger wholesalers in our market, you know, like Market Pro Homes and those guys. I get a letter every single month. Every month for four years, I get a letter every month from them. I hear you, man. But they don't know how many, they don't know how many touches it's going to take to get to that point. So they figured out, like you said, you set a budget, you set a market target, you know that market, and you know your average, you know rate of return from a seller is probably three to five percent. But if you send enough of them, that three to five percent becomes more and more deals. You're probably in their seller avatar box and like they're like, Chris fits the seller avatar box and we know we close a certain percentage of those and it's worth continuing. Yeah. They see one person on title in this neighborhood, you know, average income. They don't know mine, but average income. And they're like, yeah, this guy is probably, he's been sitting on it for four years. He's got a hundred and equity. He might want to cash out right now. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. So cool, man. I appreciate it, guys. Thanks for joining us again. And we will see you all soon. Thanks so much.