MICHAEL ZUBER INTERVIEW – Don’t Be CRAP (Cash Rich, Asset Poor), Be ARCH (Asset Rich, Cash Happy)

Welcome to the Next Level Income show. I'm Chris Larson.

And I'm Caleb Balborn.

And here we help you take both your income and your investments to the next level. Today on the show we have Michael Zuber who is author of One Rental at a Time. Michael is a full time real estate investor who Today specializes in 5 to 20 unit apartment buildings. After 15 years of investing in real estate, Michael was able to quit his W2 job out in California in the tech industry and started One Rental at a Time. And his company is now focused on helping busy professionals begin their own journey to financial freedom. Michael's goal this year is to help at least 1,000 people learn the fundamentals of real estate investing through his educational platform. Michael, we're very excited to have you on the show today. Thanks for being here.

Thank you very much, Chris and Caleb, it's an honor to be on your show.

Absolutely. So I think I first heard of you on Joe Farless podcast and your story really resonated with me. As a professional who's been in the med device industry for 15 years, hearing your path, some similarities through it, and then ultimately how you achieve financial independence through real estate really resonated with me, which is how we got in touch. Loved your book and would love to hear a little bit more about your story up through an employee to where you are today.

Absolutely. And thank you so much for reading it. It means a lot to know that that year of my is being appreciated by others. Writing a book is kind of easy. Editing a book is hard for anybody that ever wants to try.

It took us, I mean it took us three times as long to edit as we did to write ours.

Exactly, yeah, same boat. It was eye opening experience and frankly I'm glad it's over. But as far as my story goes, you know, I. So just to sort of level set, I'm now 46, so we're going to begin my story at 30. And what I'll say about pre 30 is I did everything supposedly the right way. I went to a good school, I got a good education, I got a master's degree, got a good job, got raises, climbed the corporate ladder and made a lot of money. But I wasted my 20s. When I turned 30, I had nothing to speak of except some couple of cool toys and a lot of waste. To see folks like Caleb and the like that are starting younger is awesome. But at 30 I realized that I needed to do something different. I had tried day trading stocks because that's what you did in the, in the late 90s.

That's right.

That, that worked out really, really well. Until it didn't, right? And you know, I know what it's like to have a tax loss of $100,000 and only be able to write off three grand a month or three grand a year on your taxes. Excuse me. So I've been there and I have the scars to prove it. But that really taught me that, hey, I need to do something different. So back then the only answer was to go to a bookstore, right? Because Amazon really wasn't there. You really didn't have YouTube University, none of that stuff was around. So I went to Borders and I don't know, was just hungry to find the answer, right? Because I had always seen money as a way to have freedom and security and quickly resonated or quickly latched on to real estate investing. And you know, the story begins at 30. And every book I read said, invest 30 minutes from your house. I happen to live in the Silicon Valley, right? Home of Techland. And it doesn't make sense here. It didn't make sense today. It didn't make sense 15 or 20 years ago. It just doesn't make sense as a buy and hold landlord, right? So after spending 52 weeks of not finding anything, the wife and I sort of sit around the kitchen table and go, what are we going to do? Are we going to give up? She has the bright idea to go out and look farther, right? She's like, why do we keep looking 30 minutes from home? I'm like, duh, you're so right. So we have the whole, hey, do you want to invest out of state or invest locally? The short answer is we're control freaks. So we wanted to be able to see our properties when we could. So ultimately we took out a California map, drew some circles, we found Fresno. Fresno is two and a half hours away, but it was just close enough where we can make it a day trip. So we find the first house on Norris Drive, we pick it up for 107, it rents for 1100 and you know, we are now landlords. That story doesn't begin well, though. You know, one of the things I like to talk about was in the book is you have to have your significant other on board. Because while we did our first. Yeah, well, we did that first rental, you know, two weeks, and we did everything right. We did credit checks and income verifications and rental references and all that stuff. I should say my property manager because I don't property manage from two and a half hours away. But they did that. But lo and behold, the couple broke up and the wife takes off, never to be heard from again. The gentleman turns to the bottle and starts to drink and doesn't pay his rent and just consumes alcohol a lot and destroys our house. And in California we need to evict him. So it takes 60 days. And lo and behold, at the end of that, you know, we're about four or five months into that ownership of that first property. And you know what I like to ask people is how many people would have bought a second one, right? We'd gotten one month of rent and a deposit when they moved in and never saw another penny. We still had to pay our mortgages for five months or mortgage for five months. Then we had to spend 15 grand after spending 800 on eviction fee and most people wouldn't buy a second one. But because Olivia, my wife and I were on board and on the same page, we kept going. Thankfully, after having thousands of tenants, I only have kind of two stories like that. It's just shocking. It was the first one. But where this story goes is we kept going. We rode the way from 03 to 08. We had about eight properties, seven houses in a duplex. We realized in 08 we couldn't buy that ninth property. So we had to figure it out. And short answer is we weren't going to buy another ninth, ninth property because it didn't cash flow. So we did what was called 1031 exchanges into the five to 20 unit buildings that Chris highlighted. Why? Well, the numbers, silly. Because we sold that Norris drive house for 265 and it still rented for 1100. And we bought a five unit building for 223 that rented for 3000. Think about that, right? Oh yeah, five units basically triple the rent and 50 grand cheaper or 40 grand cheaper. So we did that over and over again. We 1031 out of our 8 properties and we went to 80 units in about an 18 month period.

Awesome.

Cash flow exploded. Now the crash happens, right? So A, we saved all that artificial gain in equity because we did a 1031 exchange and paid no taxes. So score us. And then the crash happens, the Great Recession, whatever you want to call it, and we don't know any different, right? So we just go back to banks, right? Because banks lent us everything before, right? They're just going to keep doing it, right? We didn't lose anything. So, you know, let us, you know, give us some more money, right? Banks laughed us out of the building, right. I had never, never felt so dirty as to go to a bank and ask for a real estate investment loan, like 09 in 2010, right? They're like, just get out of here. You got more than four properties. We don't want to talk to you. So, you know, we could. We could. We had a choice. We could either buy cash or find another way. And we found another way. We went hard money first, right? Didn't know anything. What? Didn't know what hard money was, right. 2010 had no idea, but figured it out. And then we found private money because now Bear Stearns goes, Lehman goes. And lots of people are saving money because everybody's scared. So we did private money for a while. We went from 80 to about 150. Then the hedge funds and deep pockets come in and the market changes overnight. At the bottom, we ride the wave up. We add some more units and ultimately get to 175. A mixture of houses to 18 unit buildings is the largest we own, and we're financially free. And both retired. I retired February 1st of last year. My wife actually retired about five years before that. So this one rental at a time works. It does take exercise. And what people may not realize is I did this as a side hustle, right? A side business. I had a job that took me all over the world. Did a couple hundred thousand miles on airplanes, hundred nights in hotels. I focused on my day job, right? I wanted to make as much income as I could during the day so that I could invest on the side when that made sense. So I'm not one of these guys that say, quit your job and flip or wholesale your way to freedom. No. Right. Do what you do well. Save, I call it. Play good defense and invest what you have left. So that's kind of the story. Hopefully that wasn't too long.

Oh, that was great. That was great, man. You brought up a bunch of things that we wanted to talk to you about. Notes from the book. But I wanted to touch back on one thing, which was the power to the 1031 exchange, Michael. Because I did something very similar. Had a little more than half a dozen properties. One day I was looking at my portfolio and I realized, hey, I'm getting about 3% to 4% after tax. And I was looking at your numbers, and it seemed like you were about in the same range on your equity, and you went from, like, low single digits to, like, mid teens on your returns. It looked like. Is that accurate?

Absolutely. Yeah, it was 13 to 15, depending on how you slice the numbers.

Yeah, I wrote 14 down.

So, yeah, no, you nailed it. So you've clearly been doing this a while. And really what the key, there's really two keys there. First, I kept all that equity. Right. And as we later found out, most of that equity was fake.

Yeah, but.

But it was awesome. And second, I didn't pay taxes and I didn't add any more capital. I didn't add one penny of more capital to go from a house that was overvalued to a multifamily that was undervalued. That's awesome.

Frankly, that's super powerful. And I found your story really interesting and how similar it is to Chris and Pete's story from Canal Capital Partners. And I was wondering if you could elaborate a bit more on when you sold the house you got for 110 for 265 and made that transition. You said, you know, it's clearly about the numbers, but what was the light bulb moment when you said I'm switching over into multifamily.

Now that's a great question, Caleb, and I wish I had a great answer for you, but it's really a kind of a two step dance. So the first step of the dance is just admitting I didn't know any different. Right. I'm looking at buying my ninth house. Why? Because that's what you do.

Right.

I'm a single family house guy in 2008, but I'm also an accountant by training and numbers matter. I'm going, what? You know, like am I going to. Would I buy Norris Drive for 265, it rents for 1100. The answer is no. And everything around there was going for that, that kind of ratio and numbers. And I call them alligators.

Right.

They were just massive alligators who just eat your lunch and ultimately ate a lot of people lunch. So I couldn't pull the trigger. So I had a choice. I could either go to a different market and hope for something different or I could find a way to play in the market that I already had a team on. I decided to focus on the market that I knew because I valued the team I had built. Right. Property manager, general contractors, roofers, financers, all that stuff that you built. I'm like, I'm too busy. I cannot possibly build another team because what's, what's hard to say now that it's 08. Right. I'd fired four property managers already and I was not going to go through that nightmare again because finding a property manager when you're a full time employee and busy is the hardest part of this. It's not the deals, it's not the money. It's what team can I count on to do their freaking job? So I wasn't going to rebuild that. So, okay, so now I'm going to stay in Fresno, all right? And I'm not going to buy another house. So what do I do? And somebody in a real estate event talked about small apartment buildings. And I'm like. I'm like, you keep calling them commercial. Why is it commercial? I thought commercial was strip malls. No, idiot, commercial is five units and above, I'm like, why? Why can I buy a 4 Plex with residential? And 5 is a commercial loan? Never really got a great answer, but it's true. And it's still true today. So I started. Yeah, it's the rules, man. Just play by the rules, right?

Yeah, whatever.

So I started looking. Yeah, I started looking at the 5 to 20 because I didn't want to go too big, right? Because I was still this. I was still a single family house guy. But I started looking at numbers, and I'm like, I can't believe what I'm looking at. Why isn't everybody looking here? Nobody was. In 2008. Everybody wanted a house because Countrywide and IndyMac and all these other people would give you a loan with basically nothing down. Hence, they were overvalued. But when I looked at single families, or, I'm sorry, multifamily, 5 to 20, nobody was playing there. And I'm like, well, I'm not an idiot. Well, I'll take that every day, right? I'll. I'll 1031 this and move it over there. And, you know, that's. That's kind of how it happened, right? So it's that two step dance, right? Know who you are, made the decision where to go, and I wanted to stay. And then I just, you know, the numbers just drove the decision. And they were wildly better, right? Just.

Oh, yeah. No, it's. I had the same revelation. I was at a meeting with my wife, who's my business partner. We built houses for several years. She's an architect. And I was talking to somebody, lamenting how my returns weren't that great. And I'm dealing with some, I'd say, tenant headaches. They weren't nothing unreasonable. And he said, well, why don't you do commercial? Why don't you invest in multifamily? I was like, what's the difference? Because I knew. I'm like, commercial. Yeah, I don't want to have a big office building. I like residential. I Like, the stability. But when I looked into it, I was like, holy cow, this is not the same at all. And yeah, so it's pretty. There's another thing we have in common. But I really, I like what you say in the book. It's kind of like Warren Buffett's quote, when there's blood in the streets, buy. And you know, you're talking about in 08, 2010, you had some balls to be buying then because. But you say in the book, when everybody gets negative, get greedy. Michael. So what, like how, you know, how did it feel to go through that at that time? How did Olivia feel, you know, when you guys were like, hey, you know, everybody's like losing their shirts, People are losing their jobs, losing their homes, and you guys are out there, you know, spending your money and other people's money now. I think it takes some balls to do that, man.

Yeah, it's, you know, I mean, looking back on it, we look like geniuses, right? But in the time, I mean, we didn't know, right? Yeah, we just, it was, it was a scary time. So the story begins, right? We did our last 1031 exchange, right? Sold that last house, moved into, I think an 18 unit building, and.

I.

Think like Countrywide or somebody went out like three weeks later, right? So we did it right at the peak. And then stuff rolls over. So I call it the first pause, right? We've only paused twice in the 15 years. And a pause means we didn't buy anything for six months. So we didn't buy anything as the world was collapsing, right? The Great Recession was just picking up steam and seemingly getting worse every day was very frightening. That went on for about nine months. And suddenly we started seeing houses in the MLS for less than we bought Norris Drive. And if you remember Norris Drive, I bought it for 107. We started seeing houses at 90 that next week were 85, and then 80 and then 75. I remember looking over at some time going, I don't know when this is going to end. It's going to end sometime. We've got to get it in. And yeah, we bought some stuff on the way down, but we picked up a lot. And there was really two things that were important to me because again, I talk about all these books I read, I read about the savings and loan crisis, I read about the Texas oil catastrophe and whatever that was. And everything I read from the investors who were writing about that, all of them said something like this, I wish I bought more. So having this in my mind, I was Never going to say that. So we bought everything we could hand over fist the whole way down and added significant unit count and we bought everything. We bought lots of single family homes. I bought an 18 unit building, nothing down. I bought a 10 unit building, nothing down.

How many units? So you went from how many units?

80 at the top.

Right.

Was kind of the last 10. 31 exchange and we exited the bottom, give or take. 150 units.

Right.

We almost doubled.

Yeah. Sweet.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's impressive. Who were you working for at that time in your career?

I was in tech, selling software. Right. I think I was at Hewlett Packard at that time. Their software division.

I mean, you were with big companies doing this and so was a little managing that. You had the team in place. What structured you? Because, you know, a lot of our, A lot of our listeners, Michael, they're. They're just like you were just like I was. You know, they're working in a career and they're saying, yeah, I'd love to have, have this option, but I can't, I can't do what Michael did. But you clearly you did it. So how did, what was, what was the secret to getting the structure in place? Aside from having Olivia on board, which I. Having my wife on board has been key.

Yeah. Having your wife on. Or let's be clear, right. Your significant other. Right. I talked to lots of ladies who are all in. Right. So, yeah, significant other. Andy's is vital. Don't even bother getting started until you've had that conversation on the couch, looking each other in the eye.

Right.

Then get started. But there's really a couple of things. We didn't have a lot of time, so that necessitates making decisions. So we decided to do a couple of things. We focused on our core competencies, which for us was securing capital, that is being really good at our day jobs and finding deals. Those were the two things that we were not going to relinquish. Other than that we outsourced everything else. We had property managers since day one. So my job was bringing in the bacon, if you will, or at least Olivia's job paid the bills. And my job was investing. And then my job was to find deals. Right. I didn't trust anybody else to do that. Occasionally stuff came to us, but that was what I did. And then Olivia managed that. Relationships. I don't know exactly what she spends, but it was hours a week. And then she would do the double checking, right. She would look at the invoices and the quotes and all of that to make sure we weren't being ripped off because we were ripped off by the first four, ultimately finding the one that worked. So we probably spent collectively in our business or our side business, probably four to six hours a week. But again, it's because we focused on what we did, which was securing capital, finding deals and then double checking what was going on. So it's not a lot of time, but you've got to be focused, Right. You can't do everything. And some people I talk to that have jobs like, oh, I want to do this, I want to self manage, I want to be in three markets, I want to, I want to wholesale, I want to do 10,000 mailers. I'm like, oh my God, what the heck are you doing?

Yeah, right.

If you do all of that, you're going to sacrifice your day job and don't do that. Right. Go make that money and do this on the side. So we were lucky in that we, we were clearly good at some things and we were comfortable letting go of control of everything else. And there's lots of other stuff.

Yeah. Tying together a few things that you've brought up. Earlier on you had mentioned you would probably give advice to someone to not just drop everything and just jump straight into real estate. And then you were also saying that with you and Olivia it was most important to keep your capital. Right. And actually in Chris's book, when he talks about how to get involved in multifamily real estate, basically the first step is getting your income. Right. What would you say to someone who isn't really sure where they are in the process and might be considering jumping ship or just has no really idea what they want to do. What would you say to someone who's deciding what would be the deciding factor?

So let's be clear, right? So I know several people that have, that are early in their careers. Right. So they don't have those life things that come when you get older. Right. Meaning kids and mortgages and, and all of that other stuff. Right. If you're coming out of high school or you're in college, right. You're of legal age to sign contracts and you want to give this a shot. I know lots of people who did that and have been wildly successful. So it is absolutely possible. It is very hard. You have to, you know, you have to pay your dues. I know lots of people that did that, that got a deal kind of by happenstance and then didn't get a deal for six or eight months. Lots of self doubt, lots of questions. So it is possible. You know, my recommendations come from experience talking to them. I feel bad giving advice when I didn't do that. Right. I had a, I had a corporate job. But there's two things you need to do. You need to be extremely good at finding motivated sellers. Whether that's door knocking, driving for dollars, marketing, whatever that is. That is a skill that if you learn now, will pay off for decades. Finding and communicating with motivated sellers, that's the number one thing to figure out. Then the other thing is to figure out the process to go from controlling a contract, controlling a house, to dispositioning, right? Whether that's through via an assignment fee, whether that's hoteling, whether that's buy and hold and listening to mls, whatever that is. Then lastly, and the frankly easiest part is access to capital. Right. There are lots of people like me who have capital that if you can convince me you know what you're doing and you can find deals, people will feed you all day long. So again, find motivated sellers, figure out your niche. I would frankly recommend driving for dollars. It's the cheapest and the best way to learn your market and then from there grow. But that's what I tell them.

When you say driving for dollars, Michael, what does that. Can you share what that means for some of our listeners?

Absolutely. So if I was a 22 year old individual just out of college, wanting to give this thing a job or a shot, I would pick a zip code in my local market. For me, that might be 93728, might be 93701. These are just local zip codes in Fresno. I would drive every street on that. And then what I would do is I would take pictures of buildings or houses that look frankly uglier or stressed than the surrounding ones. That would probably, you know, if you pick 93701, you would probably end up with a list of somewhere between 75 and 150 homes. I would then spend my time, maybe go to a title company, go down, go somewhere and I would try to find the owner and I would cold call him. I would pick up the phone and say, hey, I was just driving by your house, I'm looking to buy something in that neighborhood, you know, you have any interest in selling. So driving for dollars means you're actually out there putting eyes on the property versus doing a mailer, which is a shotgun approach where you're sending out, you know, hundreds or thousands. Mailers are interesting because I used to get one a week. Now there are weeks that I have a hundred from different people. So I would say the value of mailers has gone down substantially and now people are cold calling. Right. I used to get zero. Now I'm getting five a week. So, you know, you've got to realize that this. This game you're going to get into is very crowded. There are lots of gurus out there talking about wholesaling and trying to make it look easy and virtual wholesaling and all of that stuff. It is not as easy as people try to sell you. It is hard work. But I know lots of people that make very good money doing it, so it's certainly possible.

Yeah, that's a great answer. And I mean, as the saying goes, there's a million ways to make a million dollars in real estate. And so it sounds like it's really figuring out what your strengths are and where you want to spend your time, which is really the only asset you have, and deciding, do I want to go full time and do this thing super competitive, super difficult, as you were putting it. I mean, I know people who are great at it, and I don't think that's how I would want to go about it just because I don't think my strengths would serve me well in going down that path. Or do you want to do what you've done and make a great income somewhere else that you're able to leverage into the real estate as well?

What I want people to realize with this show, or at least with my story, is there's nothing wrong with being a W2 employee. There's absolutely nothing wrong. Right. Being a W2 employee is one of the greatest things out there. Right? Go get that. Be very good at it. And then just. You've got to live below your means, people. I call it good defense. It is that earning, saving, investing cycle that if you get on and then you follow one riddle at a time or any other story, you can have a better future, right? You may, if you just get four, which is a talk I give all the time. Just get four. Your life changes. You may not be financially free, but your future is different. It's okay. Right? So don't believe all the hype and the stacks of cash you see on Instagram and Facebook and all that nonsense. It's fake 99.9% of the time. Don't fall for it. Right? There's nothing wrong with an honest day's work for an honest day's wage.

That's right.

Just live below your means and invest.

That's what. Yeah. So in my book, and I teach my boys are 7 and 9, and I tell them, this is how you get rich. Real simple. Make money, help people. You make money by helping people. You save money, you live below your means, and then you invest it. So you got to learn, you got to be good at making money, you got to be disciplined to save money, and then you got to educate yourself on how to invest. So, yeah, it's. I mean, and nobody got rich without doing a job in some way shape. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg had to leave his dorm room and go. Go out and sell and sell Facebook before he actually had a viable business. You know, it's not like you say, it's kind of a fairy tale. It's like, oh, just gonna invent something in my garage. It's a job whether you're working for somebody else or working for yourself.

Yeah. No such thing as an overnight success. Facebook's been around for 15 years now. That's crazy. Yeah. It's insane.

Yeah.

Can you tell us a little bit about crap and arch?

Yeah. So one of the things you'll learn about me is I like to create stories because stories are memorable. And one of the things that I've quickly realized is a lot of my friends have a lot of cash, but they have no assets. So I was thinking about how can I create a story that almost slaps you in the face kind of nicely and makes you pay attention? So I often call a lot of my friends crap. Now, they're all capital letters, and there's periods between them, right? So it's C period, R period. Right. You get the idea. But crap stands for cash rich, asset poor. And I believe being crap is horrible, bad, the wrong idea. Right? Because cash is trash. Cash is depreciating. We know all of these things, but there are too many people out there saving money or having money in the stock market that feel good. I promise you. You are one bear market away from being in freaking trouble and afraid being cash rich and asset poor is the wrong idea. So I am spending a lot of time trying to help people that are crap. So I know that that story works. I got good feedback. My daughter, who's an illustrator, created a logo of a pile of crap, and money's falling on it, right? So there's a whole story there. And I had to create something that was opposite of that, that was much harder, Right. Because kind of crap just rolled together, Right? Cash rich, asset poor. And I'm like, God, what's the opposite of that? So asset rich was kind of easy. Right? That's The A and the R. And I'm like, well, how do I finish that? Because you don't want to be cash poor. Right. That's not great. And frankly, not a word. So that's off. So that's where cash happy came in. So asset rich. Cash happy. Right. I don't have lots of cash. I have the reserves and I have this. But frankly, anytime I get above whatever number I'm comfortable in, I get nervous. Right. I got to go buy another asset. And everybody's number is different. So that's where crap and arch come in is. I think crap is a problem. I use it on purpose to shock people. Right. Because it kind of. I don't mean it as a swear word, but that's what everybody hears the first time. But yeah, it's cash rich. Asset poor is a problem. And I want you to think about being asset rich and cash happy. Hence crap and arch.

I love it.

Yeah. No, I think people say cash is king. Cash flow is king. Right?

Amen.

Yeah. I mean, cash is great, but if it's just sitting there in a pile, it's crap. I like that. That's our mission on the show is, you know, big pieces, educating young people and breaking some of these paradigms. It's like, oh, you go to college that, you know, you get a good job and, you know, that's all you got to do. Or, you know, buy a house and, you know, buy a car. You know, buy like Snoop Dogg said, we were at this conference, Grant Cardone's conference last weekend. Snoop Dogg, he was playing, he goes, I'm so glad you're doing this Grant, because nobody's teaching people about this stuff.

Yeah.

So I love that you're. You have this resource. So. Yeah, I mean, so people, people want to learn how you did this, Michael. People want to. People want to get your book. You know, they want to. They want to learn from your mistakes. What's the best way to get in touch with you? You know, where can they find you? Online? Yep. Bookstore. Where's the best place to get a hold of you?

Yeah. So the book that is self published on Amazon. So if you just go to Amazon, you can type in one reel at a time. It'll come right up. Or you can type in Michael Zuber. It'll come right up. It's 1499 in paperback and 999 in Kindle or ebook. As for getting a hold of me, I do put out a YouTube channel, and I'm guessing you can guess the title. It's one rental At a time. It's kind of what I do, where I post daily content. You know, there's kind of four themes that I put out. I interview guests like this and sort of share what's going on and ask lots of different questions, just as you've done. I do something called subscriber questions, which has really taken off. I'm a one man show. So when people leave a comment on any video, right, and it's a question, I typically look to create the answer within 48 to 72 hours and it's usually three to five minutes long. To answer the question. I do something called Real Talk, which is just something I read in the headlines or something and I just give my kind of feedback and you know, hey, you know, this bothered me. Or yeah, you know, I went out and said I don't think the Fed's going to raise rates this year. In fact, I think the next thing's a cut versus a raise. You know, just whatever's top of mind. I usually do that in the morning when I'm walking my dog. Just kind of, you know, something to do in the morning. And then the last thing is I do check out.

I like those, by the way.

Thank you. And that's awesome. Then the last thing is I walk through projects, right. Whether it's a disgusting slumlord property that needs to be just totally trashed or the finished product. So yeah, I have fun. I do what I do because I like helping people. And thus, you know, the only thing I have to sell is the book. And that's just because Amazon makes me sell it. And you know, I give everything away on the YouTube channel for free. So just subscribe and you know, you'll get a alert every day about something else I put out.

Yeah, absolutely. Guys, don't forget to get on there and subscribe to his channel. And before we go, Mike, you had shared a funny story with us before we started the show you called the Hammer Story. Could you share that with our audience?

Oh yeah. The fun of being a landlord. So this is about halfway through our career. It's one of the apartment buildings we picked up after the 1031 exchanges. And you know, property managers go on site, they see what's going on, making sure it's kept there, and we see a new tenant in one of our units. So we go up and say, hey, are you a guest? Right? Are you just, you know, you an overnight guest or you know what's going on? And they tell us that. No, they basically sublet it from the person that we approved. And we go on to find that they'd been there about a month. So we check, and they paid rent, right? We're like, oh, all right. So paid rent. So far, no problems, no red flags. None of the other guests have complained or tenants have complained. And we're like, okay, well, you know, we run. We run a tight ship. So we go the next day, knock on his door, he opens. It's all good, right? So we asked him to sign a lease because, you know, we just wanted to be, you know, great, you're here, they're gone. Let's just make this above board. So he gets a little antsy. He does fill out the paperwork, and we go back there, the team goes back to the office, and we find out that we have now given. Been given fictitious information. It's not the real person. That person we're given doesn't exist or doesn't match numbers, right? So we're like, red flag, right? So we. We go back and let them know we're not happy about that. And, you know, we say, we're gonna evict you if, you know, was this an honest mistake? Like, did you miss a number? Right? What happened? And this is when it gets go south, slams the door. You know, it gets kind of, you know, antsy from there. So my team takes off and like, okay, we're gonna do cash for keys. They call me, right? We're gonna do cash for keys or we're going to start eviction. And lo and behold, that night, he throws what I now call the Hammer party.

This is an MC Hammer, right?

Yeah. No, not MC Hammer. This is physically invite all of your friends over, turn up the music really, really loud, and give everybody that walks in a hammer. And police are called multiple times and ultimately shut the party down. And when my team gets in there the next day, there are hammer holes, probably 10,000 of them, through the drywall in my apartment. You know, that takes a long time to do 10,000 hammerholes. And, you know, that's a horrible story, but, you know, thank God they're gone, right? So, you know, drywall's drywall. You can fix it pretty easily. But, yeah, that was interesting, right? You know, how mad do you have to be to throw a party? And, you know, it's just sometimes people are people, and you just got to move on in this business. And that's my Hammer story.

But that being said, you've had your first house. You have that story. You had, I mean, 150 units, you know, thousands of tenants over the course of your real estate career. That's pretty good track record.

Yeah, I've only had two stories like that. Right. There's the first story we had with the first house we bought, which is uneventful, which was terrible because it happened in the first one. And then this hammer story. But yeah, I've had thousands of tenants over 15 years and 99.85% of them are awesome. They pay the rent. They're hard working people and they just want a safe place to live and raise their family. And then there's the point. What is it? 0.15 that are problems and just part of the business. Most people, and most being a high, high number, are just honest, hard working people that want to do right by their family. It's a great business.

Absolutely.

Totally. In that 0.15 people, they give you some crazy stories that you can tell. So there's always that.

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Actually, one question that we like to ask on the show is if you could go back in time to when you were 25 and tell yourself one piece of advice from everything that you've learned, but only one piece of advice, what would it be?

I would say play good defense. I did. As I shared in my story, I made pretty decent money as a, you know, in my 20s that if I would have started even five years earlier, I'd probably be double the size I am today.

Wow.

Right. Because this business is a time game. Right? When you're in this business for seven, eight years, it kind of feels like what's going on, the cash flow is not great. It's just a trickle and then it just explodes. Right. Rent increases and inflation and mortgage pay down and refinances and just all the stuff that you get to leverage because time is your friend. Oh, man. If I would have started five years earlier, things would be, they're really good now, but boy, they'd be really, really good.

Yeah, that's what I tell Caleb. I mean, I started when I was 20 and 21 technically and took me 15 years, hit 35 and cash flow was good and we started rolling stuff over. Of course we had the hit of, you know, recession in there, but damn, you know, if I started buying apartments when I was 25 instead of 35, yeah, it would, then that's. I told Caleb, like, dude, just get, skip, skip the step. So that's, you know, I think that's, that's why you're on, Michael. I want people to have you as a resource, to be able to rely on you. You rely on us, you know, so they don't, they don't have to make the same mistakes. And they can. I call it take the Shortcut to Success. There you go. We really appreciate having you on today and hope people check you out on YouTube, hope people buy your book on Amazon and we'll have it in the show notes so people will be able to get your book, get our book, check you out on YouTube. And hope we are able to stay in touch and hear more about the success you're having with people you're helping out.

Absolutely. Thanks for the invite, and I look forward to staying in touch.

Absolutely.

What a great quote to wrap up the show, too. This business is a time game. Remember that. If you're listening.

Yeah.