Investment Strategies During a Recession

Hey, this is Craig Weir. Welcome back to another episode of what's Next for Retirement. So, you know, there's some really crazy things going on right now. A lot of the our advisors are talking to people about, holy smokes, what's going on in the stock market, what about the economy, we're going to have this recession. What's going to happen? What do I do with my investments, how do I change things around? And of course, you know, we focus on our tax issues that we do with people to try to help them save a ton of money by doing timely Roth conversions and accelerated Roth conversions. But the big picture of what we're really trying to do is to help our clients be in a better spot down the road than what they were before they met us. And that gets us into a lot of different things. Everybody on our team are certified financial planners. They get a lot of experience, a lot of different areas. So we're able to help in a lot of different ways. And one of those ways always comes down to the investment arena. We have some big issues right now. It's not a surprise to anybody on this podcast, but the big issues really have to do with some things that not everybody really relies on. You know, I don't like to rely on my emotions of how I make investments, because emotions can lead me in the wrong direction. I like to rely on kind of what has worked, what can I hang my hat on? And of course, there's nothing that's 100% accurate. But, you know, history leaves clues, and if you pay attention to the clues, you can maybe keep yourself from getting burned or having some problems. And so that's what today's about, is to kind of tell you what the clues are out there and then to provide you with the solution. I've got a special guest with me today that I really hope that you listen up and you kind of think about what he has to offer. But let me set up that conversation by just saying, look, our big issue of the day isn't necessarily just where the stock market is, because underneath the stock market is really a telltale, which is what is happening with interest rates. And you hear about interest rates and on the screen. For those of you that are watching this podcast, as opposed to just listening on the screen, you'll see in front of you kind of a visual representation of what interest rates have done for all of this year. And for those of you maybe driving or running or whatever, you happen to be at the gym or whatever, you know, we had interest rates as low as the 10 year treasury rates were as low as 3.3% back in April. And recently they're just almost touching 5%. They're like 4.7% or something like that. And they go up and down over time. The problem isn't just that interest rates have risen. The problem is that interest rates in the short term are actually higher than what you can get on interest rates longer term. So a two year treasury is, or a shorter year treasury interest rate is actually higher than a longer term treasury interest rate. And you wouldn't expect that. You'd expect that the longer you're going to have. Let's just go to a world that everybody understands. The longer you're going to have a cd, the greater the return by holding that CD five years than if you went out and you got a little six month cd. Well, the problem with this is actually called a yield curve inversion. So when the yield curve inverts, it really just signals a point in history where short term rates are higher than long term rates. And why does that matter? Well, the whole process of financial intermediation relies on banks and institutions and businesses being able to borrow short term and then they lend or run their businesses long term. And when the cost to borrow short term is a lot higher than the revenue that they can earn, they just lose massive amounts of money. It's kind of like buying hot dogs for $2 and selling them all day long for a buck. It's a surefire way to lose money. Right. So that is really the big problem and what it points to if we look back at history, what it should mean and what you should be. Your takeaway from this just real short economic thing is that it projects a recession. And a recession is not a great time in our economy at all. And you can see, for those of you that are actually watching the podcast, you can see that every time the yield curve has inverted within a certain number of months, we have had a recession. The current environment is that the yield curve inverted on October 26 of 22 and it stays inverted today. And we would expect based on history, that they, the media and the financial gurus would actually predict, publicize that we're in a recession. Maybe not till July or August of next year, but we are entering into a recession either this quarter or next quarter. Now the reason that's a big deal is that every time we have had a try to find, there it is. So on your screen you see that the yield curve has been inverted four times in the last 30 years. This is really significant Each time that it is inverted, it's resulted in a stock market crash and a recession. That's every time, that's 100% accuracy over the last 30 years. So we've got a very highly stimulated stock market that's been funded with Fed money of all the money they put in the last few years. And it's really falling quickly and it's hinting to pretty low or at least negative economic growth. So and that has all kinds of implications of what's going to happen next and where money, where you should park money and what opportunities exist out there. So for those of you that are watching the podcast, I have a screen showing as of today what The S&P 500 has done just in the last couple of years. Yeah, last couple years. And it, and there's a different statistic here, but the red line that's coming across underneath this is just what's called a 200 day moving average. Don't get, don't get too hooked on the mechanics of it because I can lose myself and you both if we go too deep on this. But you'll notice that when the stock market fell below that 200 day moving average, it here earlier it tested, it came back up and then it took off and went way down. Then it came back up, but it didn't quite go above that 200 day moving average back in July and August of last year. Instead it came down even to lower lows before trying to rally again. And then finally it did come back above that in the early part of 2023. Many people believe that the only reason that that really sustained itself was because of the massive amounts of money that went in. But, but what's happened is all this year we've had interest rates being increased, right? And now you'll notice that we've been above the 200 day moving average again. And then all of a sudden over the last couple months, what's happened is the markets have really soleno sold off since late July. Even so now that we're now below that 200 day moving average. So it just points to within a recession and when the yield curve inverts, it really can become some really ugly stock market things. Now I don't know whether the market's going to take off and drop and go back down to 3,500 points again or not. I just know that the warning signs are all over the place, right? And so you got to pay attention to those. The other thing is this is kind of a geeky slide. I won't Spend a lot of time on the details of it. But the longer it takes to get into a recession, and we've looked at a year since the yield curve inverted, that normally points to a longer time that you're in a recession. And the longer you're in a recession, the lower the market goes, the lower returns that you get. And that kind of intuitively makes sense without all the economic mumbo jump. If the longer the mark, the longer the economy is bad, the worse the stock market is going to do is really the short version of that. Right. So what do you do with all this information? And I've given it to you kind of really quickly so that we don't have all of our eyes glazed over and nobody wants to look at charts and graphs all day long. But so I guess there's really just a few options for you to consider. You could do nothing. You could look at the chart on the screen right now and you can say, look, market has its ups and downs. It's no big deal. I'm just going to kind of live with it. And you can just brace yourself, kind of hold your nose and look the other way and just wait for a better day four or five years from now. That's certainly one way that you can do it, and that's certainly probably what people will do. But if this turns out to be a longer recession than normal, you may have to wait four or five years before you get back up to. Even if the market continues to roll over and if the signals of the past continue to do that. Or another thing you could do is just really pay attention to when the markets do have their drops like we're in right now is a low point of several months. Do your Roth, your ira, Roth conversions when it's low, as opposed to waiting for a Christmas rally or whatever you think may happen, those lower values that exist when you do your conversions means you get to convert the same amount of shares, but at a lower tax rate. Right? Because it's lower doll dollar amount, not a lower tax rate, lower total tax because the dollar amount is lower. The other thing you could do is you could take some of the profits off the table. Maybe you had a great first of the year. You still have positions that are looking really good. Swap some of those dogs out for some of the winners, take some of the money off the table, offset the losses to where you don't have to pay a lot of tax on those. If you're looking at IRA money where there aren't any taxes owed, when you make the transaction, it still makes some sense to maybe lock in some of the gains that you've had, raise some cash. And if you believe this stuff may roll over, then get ready to take advantage of lower markets at the time. Right. If you're a day trader, if you're kind of the kind of people that we work with, occasionally that you're in and out of the market, this is kind of your market. I mean, when volatility increases, it creates a tremendous amount of opportunity for day traders to come in and to find trading bands and to really be able to make some money on that. But the other thing, and this is really where our focus of our conversation is today. The thing that I've done with my own resources, not that it's right or better, but I believe it or I wouldn't be talking about it, I wouldn't do it with my own money, is reinvest some of that cash that you raise or cash that you already have on the sidelines into alternative asset classes. So, you know, we talk a lot about diversification in a portfolio and most of the people that you work with are only going to talk about stocks and, or bonds. And then when they get into stocks, they'll diversify it among large cap, mid cap international, and maybe they'll look at different industries if they're really forensic in what they do. And they'll do different bonds, corporate and Treasuries and different time to maturity. But there's a whole other asset class out there that gets avoided a lot in our portfolios. But we know that they make money. You just aren't sure really the right way to invest in them. And that's oil and gas or apartment buildings or storage facilities, industrial complexes, even currencies and metals and that sort of thing. And that's what our guest today is here to talk about is kind of some of those things that you might kind of think about putting your money in. So I'd like you to welcome Ben Nelson. He's with Ashcroft Capital. Ben, thanks for taking the time to kind of be on this episode with me. I hope I've set you up for some really good conversation here. This is where most financial advisors world ends and where money can be made on things that they don't even put their hat on. So thanks a lot for coming on the show with me.

Well, thanks for having me. And I loved your slideshow that you couldn't be more right. The inverted yield curve is making a lot of people nervous. And I like to tell people that Mark Twain's quote of history doesn't always repeat itself, but it often rhymes. And I think that you're saying that really well. And just what people are looking at down the road, one, two, six months out, it's concerning. It has a lot of people on edge and people are wondering, where do I put my money?

So what does Ashcroft Capital do? Give me the big picture of kind of the, the space that you work in, what you guys do.

Sure. So we are a syndicator. We pool investor capital and we use that to buy apartment complexes. We don't buy small apartment complexes, we buy bigger ones with the hope of renovating them over like a three to five year period and then selling them to institutions down the line. We actually sold quite a few in 2022 to Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs, Blackstone and a lot of other major institutions. So that's our bread and butter. We go in and through vertical integration of owning a property management and construction management company, we buy 20 to 30 year old apartments, renovate them, and then get them ready for sale.

So it's almost as though you're an incubator for getting deals ready for the institutions to buy, right?

That's true in some ways. Not every time an institution buys our deals. But what we have been very successful in doing, especially in the Sun Belt region of the United States where you're seeing a ton of growth, what we've been very successful in doing is buying apartments that are, say, class B, which are a little bit more affordable in today's economy where people are pinched and it's very difficult to buy a home. And we go in there and we renovate not only the complex itself, which are the community areas like weight room or pool or things like that, but we can we renovate each unit individually so we give people a nicer place to live with, still being affordable in today's economy. And because of that, we have high occupancy rates, generating a lot of cash flow and making money for our investors.

Nice. So I've got my wife and I have some really good friends that they own two apartment buildings or apartment complexes out in California and they've owned them for many years and they've watched what's happened with those and they get all kinds of rents. They've got a property management company that takes care of it. And you could not pry those two apartment complexes out of that guy's hands. Now the financial guy in me has said to him, man, you're holding these too long. There was a time where you really got Most of your profits out of it, it was time to sell it and to move on to something else. But, you know, they're doing their thing and it's working for them and they got a huge income coming out of it and a huge net worth because of it. But, you know, not everybody's going to want to actually own the actual apartment complexes and deal with the business of being an apartment owner. But let's just kind of focus on the whole. When we talk about apartments in your world and. Well, in your world and in mine, we call it multifamily. Right. As opposed to just a door that we walk in and it's our home. So why the multi family segment of the market? Why should somebody, if they're looking at diversifying and not having all their money in the stock market or underneath their mattress or sitting in the bank and they want to do something different and they're convinced, okay, I need to do alternatives, why should multifamily be a portion of that diversification?

Well, I, I could go into a very long answer here, but really the, the, the basis of it is the fundamentals of. There's a housing shortage in the United States right now. The market is extremely, extremely slow. As far as new transactions, I think I saw the other day that the new average home buyer is 36 years old, which I, I don't know anyone who's listening if that was when you bought your first home, but it wasn't when I bought mine. And Craig, I don't think it was when you boug. But people are running fundamentally, we are becoming a nation of renters. And maybe it's because people can't afford it or maybe because people have said, you know, this lifestyle is for me, like, I don't, I don't mind, I don't mind renting versus having a home. So the demand is there. Also, there are certain markets in this country where things are just a lot cheaper, either from cost of living or tax benefit. And we seek those markets. We seek buying apartments in markets where there's inward migration of people, there's healthy job growth, healthy economies, and therefore, we have a really good indication that we're going to have steady, stable occupancy in those units. But for me, it starts with the fundamentals. After that. I really, really want to hit on the fact that in every previous recession, and you can go back to the 1940s on this, I'd be happy to share that chart with you at some point, Greg. But rents have grown in every previous recession. 2008 and 2009, they paused for just a little bit of time, but after that, they started growing again. If you look at the chart, it's. It's pretty fascinating to see that no matter what the stock market has done, rents have grown. And if you look at the delta right now with the cost to own versus the cost of rent, it hasn't been this high since 1995. So it's really pushing people towards renting. And those are some of the things that we see in this asset class.

You know, I noticed that to your point earlier, a lot of the younger married couples and singles are. They don't. They don't really have the same passion for. I got to own my own home as what I'll say guys my age did, in that, you know, it was important to have your house and to build equity and to get it paid off. And they're not at a place. They're not at that space right now. Except for the last couple years. Their life's experience around the country was that owning a home didn't really work out very well for some of the folks where markets started turning over and people started losing houses. It's only since we had all the stimulus come in that interest rates got lower. But they still are wanting to rent, whether it's an apartment or a home or something. They're not. That whole passion for homeownership isn't quite as strong as what I saw in the past. But, you know, a lot of people that are listening in on this are really concerned and probably will be concerned enough that they kind of get the old deer in the headlights syndrome where they just don't do anything, which in my opinion is. It's okay for short periods of time until you get your sea legs about you, but doing nothing with the environment we have and inflation where it is, is kind of a recipe for really your money going backwards. But. So if we're. You kind of hinted to it, but I want to dig in a little bit deeper and maybe give you an opportunity to talk about a couple other things here. But, you know, for the. For the man or woman that's listening to this, that's going, geez, I'm not satisfied with that. All my money's in the stock market any longer, and I already have a little bit of gold. I'm not sure I really want to do that because it doesn't produce anything other than for me in terms of cash flow or tax benefits or anything else. But. But let's say they are concerned about where the economy's going, you've already mentioned that rents have always gone up. But is there anything else that you maybe, maybe is back in your back of your mind about why is now a good time to move into multifamily as opposed to let me hold my money and see how this works out?

Well, there, there's a great quote saying you can't steal second with your foot on first. So if you want to make some progress, eventually you're going to have to take some risk. But the question really is, where are you going to take that risk? Cap rates, which is an indicator of how profitable an apartment will be, It's a longer definition than that, but cap rates have gone up. And so in this market you're seeing the commercial real estate, specifically multifamily, the prices of those go down and you want to be a buyer when things go down. When you think about office space post pandemic, there's a lot of people who aren't coming back into the office. I think Craig and I are examples of that here on this call. We're not going back into the office. Still being very productive, as I would like my, my, all my colleagues and management to know, but still being very productive. But that, that is a problem. There's an occupancy problem in the office space. But think about, think about multifamily. Think about apartments. With an apartment shortage in this country and it's still being difficult with the supply chain to get things online, get things built. You're not seeing people transact homes as often because of the rates and all the ways that hinders you from buying a home, but you are seeing very high occupancies, especially in hot areas in the United States as cap rates have gone up. So we've, we've established that there is high occupancy and there's cash flow. As cash cap rates have gone up, the prices of multifamily properties have come down. So for example, we have a current offering right now. We bought three properties in there. These three properties we bought at 25% less than they were going for in 2022. They're in North Carolina and two in Florida. And these are actually off market deals. These are people that transacted exclusively with us. They were having some debt servicing issues. And when those kind of opportunities come up, we did steal second. We went out there and said, we, we love this cash flowing asset, we love this market and we're going to go grab these at 25% off because we think in five years, we'll be in a completely different interest rate environment. And these end up making our investors a lot of money.

Well, I don't know whether I stole this quote from you or somebody else, because I certainly know it's not original. But I think in the syndication business, where you gather other people's money and put those toward projects, my 38 years of experience would validate whoever I got this quote from that the jockey is much more important than the horse. In this case, whoever it is that's steering the ship and running the program is really important. So here's an opportunity I'd like you to kind of thump your chest a little bit, but tell us, you know, is Ashcroft just, you know, is it a startup deal of two brothers who decided they got this big dream and they got a great idea and they're really gung ho and going to do it, or what's the big deal about Ashcroft? Why would we want to trust Ashcroft with some of our resources?

Sure, great question. So we have about 3 billion in assets under management. Almost 14,000 doors. So we're.

Hold on. That's 3 billion. Did you say 3.

3 billion in assets under management? Yeah, about 14,000 doors. Over 3,000 investors with us. And as I've told you Before, Craig, over 65% of our investors come into one or more of our deals. There's. As a financial advisor, I'm sure that's something you're. You would love to have. But yeah, there's a lot of return business. We get return business because we treat people right and because we communicate very well. And because the returns have been there. We have a good track record. We bought 55 apartment complexes still holding, selling 29 of those. We've gone full cycle on 26, which means that we bought the asset, we rebranded it, took about two years to renovate it and sold it. And on those deals, we've done about a 1.8x multiple, 25.6% cash on cash, return annualized, and a 22.7% IRR. Big reason that I throw all those numbers out there is why are we able to do that in this market? Most of it has to do with vertical integration. When you own the property management company and you own the construction company, there are so many efficiencies gained, there's so much increased transparency, and you're able to pull the levers that you may not be able to pull. If you're hiring a third party trans property manager, you might not be able to pull those same levers or see the same data you need to see. So with that and procuring our own, our own materials and storing them here in the United States, we're able to save on a typical renovation. We're able to save about 35% over doing it wholesale. So that helps us drive net operating income, that helps us drive, that helps us drive value to the apartments, that helps us drive nicer places for people to live, and that helps us drive returns for LPs.

Cool. So it just occurred to me that I probably should have said this at the beginning for those people listening in. Our firm, Q3 Advisors does not sell any financial products. We don't earn commissions on any investment sales. We don't have a referral system with Ashcroft where Ashcroft pays us any money to do anything either way. This is just an idea that I believe in very strongly. I put my own money into this kind of stuff and, and have with Ashcroft, they. But I wanted to kind of help people understand this is not a pitch. So that I send you to Ashcroft and they pay me a bunch of money. Would you concur with that, Ben? We don't have any, any financial relationship between us. There's no money.

Yeah, correct. Yeah. So we're a 506C. We don't have deals with, we don't have deals with financial advisors to where we do that. Most of the people who come to us are from referrals from people like you, Greg, or they're from people who have been very active in the real estate space and said, I'm, I'm spending more time on this than I am on my normal job. And I am tired of fixing toilets and broken sinks and I'd rather just sit back and collect mailbox money from someone who does this every day, all day for a living. And I get to go back to my normal job or retire or do whatever it is they want to do.

You know what's been interesting is my journey with syndications has been really interesting. I started in the financial planning business in 1986. And back then, what was really big were all the tax deals, right? So the big companies put together things, you get this huge tax write off on the front end. And the economics didn't really matter. It was just tax rates were really high. And as long as I got the tax deal, it's all that they cared about. But what I've also noticed through the years is every time I'd have a wholesaler from one of the big syndicate, one of the big national Retail syndicators come out. I rarely did any of that. In fact, I only did it for a few years. And then I got in the business long enough where I got to experience more and learn more and become more wise back in the late 80s, early 90s. And I. It occurred to me that by the time those deals got to the customer, the financial advisor or stockbroker and everybody in between got the biggest returns. And the guy that was actually putting the money in it at the end, he wasn't going to get very. He wasn't going to have an opportunity to make a whole lot of money. He just got to feel good about having something other than stocks and bonds and that kind of thing. What I've noticed is as we've started our business and we started reaching a national platform and talking to people all over the country, when I was actually meeting with all of our clients myself, I noticed that some of the guys that had done the best and were the least worried about where the economy was going were guys that had put a lot of money into a variety of different syndicates and they found like an Ashcroft. And they just kept doing more and more deals with them over the time frame. And I noticed that in the deals that aren't put out to the financial advisor community, you don't have that 7 or 8 or 9% commission paid out up front. When they deal with somebody like you, the fees to get it to market are lower because you don't have all kinds of different people in the process of marketing it. They just deal directly with a company like you. The negative, though, that some people need to be aware of is that, you know, if. If you need money to go take your family on a vacation and it's sitting in a brokerage account, you can make a telephone call and you get the money sent to you. You need to realize that in the syndication world, it's just like owning real estate in real life in some regards. You know, if you want to, if you want to sell it, it's not going to be easy. And in the syndication world, they're counting on you, on using your money part of everybody else's for a period of time. And so you need to plan on not being able to get your money out of it. And you need to kind of let the race run its course to where you let them. You understand what you're doing, you understand what their game plan is, and you let them go do your job, do their job. You don't fire them in the middle and get your try to get your money back. So there, that's a fancy way of saying it's an illiquid investment. But because of that, you also don't have the dramatic price swings every day. Right. You get, you kind of have, you're kind of forced into just letting the markets, the real estate market, letting the jockey do their job. So in the types of offerings that you guys put out, how long is somebody going to tie up their money? How long should they plan on leaving their money into maybe one of your deals so that they don't kind of put too much in something that they need money back out of?

Sure, yeah. So most of the people who come to us are looking for a way to diversify out of the stock market. Our deals are five years, and that gives us time not only to go through real estate cycles and hit them at the best times, it gives us time to find a buyer towards the end. We have sold deals in as short as 14 months. Our longest one has gone 53 months. When we have a collection of different deals, then we, we definitely want to be able to package those and sell those, which takes a little bit longer, but I would anticipate, if you want to call it illiquidity, for five years, during that time, there is income that is paid monthly. And, and you said it great, Greg. Like, there's no mark to market on this. Like, we're going to show you definitely how many units we've renovated. In a monthly email, we're going to show you the occupancy, the delinquency payments, everything that you would see as an operator, you're going to see that as an lp. But you don't have to sit there and watch it and go, man, the market's getting crushed. I'm watching my assets go down by the second. No, it's saying you're still getting your cash flow. We're still renovating units and growing the value of those units, and we're making it good for sale two, three, four years down the road.

Yeah. The other thing too, if you have money, that is, if you, if you have money in an IRA or Roth, all the income that comes into that account is tax free or tax deferred or tax free, depending on the account. We like to get people to convert their IRAs over to Roths so that the benefits of whatever their investment is becomes totally tax free for the rest of their lifetime. So the income then is tax free. If you guys do the job you've been doing and when all the capital comes back in and distributions are made of profits, all that becomes tax free also. But one thing we need to kind of point out is for folks that have significant balances outside of their IRAs and Roth IRAs, the deal kind of gets even sweeter because there are tax advantages to investing in real estate, right?

There are, yes. So.

Tell the listeners kind of, you know, on a given hundred thousand dollars of investing, what kinds of things, what kind of benefits happen to them up front and how is some of that taxable income sheltered for them?

Sure. So let me start this by saying I'm not a tax advisor. I don't claim to be one. It's not a side gig for me. But I will tell you what has happened with some of our other investors. So we cost segregate when we go in. We can depreciate an asset on a 5, 7, 15 year schedule. And due to that we're very good at this. We have been able to generate pass through depreciation losses for our investors. We're very cognizant about sending K1s out early and our K1s on a first year usually have a very nice loss that our investors use to offset other passive income they receive. So we're anticipating that we're going to have a nice 28 to 35%. It's hard to, it's, it's a moving target with taxes. As you know, we're anticipating 28 to 35% is what we will have on our 2023 K1 for our current offering. That of course can change. But that would mean on $100,000 investment you'd be looking at a 28,000 to $35,000 loss in year one for depreciation. A lot of people find that useful. And I send a lot of sample K1s out to our investors to say, send this to your cpa. Do you think that this could help you? One other tax advantage you didn't mention, Craig, is 1031 exchanges. 1031 exchange is something that you're able to move an asset to another like kind asset which can help you to offset some taxes and push them down the road while keep your velocity of capital moving. We offer that, we make it very simple for our investors. Whenever a deal closes, we say you have two options. You can either 1031 this into another deal. If you had 100,000 and it turned into 170, your new investment is now 170 and that continues to pay you income off of that.

Yeah. So the other thing too, I'll just point out is that those depreciation losses and offsets have to be used against other passive income that you might have. So it's not going to count against your dividends from your stocks or your Social Security or pension or that kind of thing. But if you have other investments that are generating what is classified as passive income, then those losses can offset that too. And as you receive income on any, most of these real estate syndications you're going to be able to have, if they, let's say they have a 5% distribution rate, there's going to be some built in depreciation on that as well. So not all of that is likely to be taxed. So you get some benefit there also by having it in the non qualified space. I'm kind of of the camp that if I've got money in Roths and iras, actually Roth iras, I'd rather have the money in that than anywhere because it's tax free forever. I don't ever have to be concerned about any of that. But if you are wealthy and you have other passive income, then you probably want to make sure that you do everything you can to play the tax game as legally as you possibly can.

I think if there are advantages out there, you should grab them.

Yeah, yeah. Take your hairy toe right up to the line and don't cross it is what I tell my cpa. Right. All right, so what haven't I asked you about that you think is relevant for listeners to kind of understand about diversification, asset classes, Ashcroft, holding periods, any of that kind of thing. Anything that I've left off, I think.

You covered it really well. You know, in contacting me, I'll obviously be able to give you quite a bit of information. You can go as deep or as shallow as you want in this field, but I like to buy things when they're on sale, especially if I know they're in high demand. And right now multifamily is in high demand. And the areas that we buy, there's a lot of people moving there. Just quick example in, in where we bought one of our assets in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, there's one new house being built for every 15 jobs created. And 15 jobs, that means 15 families typically. So if you're looking at one new house and every 15 jobs, they gotta live somewhere. And so we, we bought an apartment there. And I like that we got it on the, on the cheap. I like that we got it for 75% of its value. I like that it's highly occupied and we have a lot of investors who feel the same way. They say we want some diversification, we want income and we want the chance for growth at the end. And we offer all of that and a smiling face to talk to you on the other end. We're a relationship based company.

Well, if you want to, if you want if you would like to connect with Ben Nelson and learn more about Ashcroft or any of the current offerings that they have, we'll place his contact info and some links in the podcast notes of this show so you can make sure that you get with him there. Stay tuned for, you know, if you haven't already, make sure that you subscribe to this and follow the podcast so that the next time we come out with some new riveting financial information, you'll be one of the first to know and you can kind of keep in touch with these. I've done several of these kinds of things lately. We plan on doing a lot more of them. So I hope that this information was helpful to you and I hope you take a moment to reach out to Ben and to kind of see how this may fit into your long term game plan. So hit the subscribe button, come back and see me. Ben, thank you for joining us.

Thanks Greg. Good talking to you and thank you to your.