Investor-centered Attorney Joe Seagle Drops Gold Nuggets About How to Protect Investments Smartly

Are you one of the many busy professionals working in offices day in and day out? Do you wonder how some people grow their wealth fast, retire early and play on work days? Well, you're in luck because Ginny Bolling hosts this show Pivots of Prosperity where she interviews people that can do just that play on work days. Many guests have become financially free. She also interviews people that are on their journey and people that are in support roles like attorneys, contractors, brain brokers and others. Commercial real estate is the common element. She is on a mission to be sure. Busy professionals know they can own substantial commercial properties too, like apartments, self storage facilities and others, and not have to do the work managing them. Passive investing is the key. Syndications are the typical method. Tax write offs are some of the biggest rewards. Ginny and partners find the deals, build a strong team and business plan, then offer the investment opportunities to passive investors. New episodes are released every Tuesday at 12, so watch for new releases. If you want to get involved, let us know. You need to get pre qualified to hear about most deals. See the show notes for contact information.

Hello, Jenny Bowling here with Pivot to Prosperity brought to you by Pivotal Real Estate Investments. Investors build wealth and income through commercial real estate that improves communities. And today we have the esteemed Joe Siegel here. Thank you Joe for coming.

Thanks for having me.

Yes. Well, I am so glad that you're here and I have known you for probably or of you at least since 2017. We've interfaced here and there and you've taught several different classes. I've attended and whatnot through CFRI Central Florida Realty Investors, which is our local RIA Real Estate Investors Association. And I'm going to give that a plug because I'm on the board for I'm a firm believer that it's a great organization and anybody that's investing in real estate can get something out of joining and networking, much less going to any of the classes obviously too. But anyway, yes. So Joe, tell us about your practice.

Oh well again, thanks for having me. Our practice, I mean, I'm based in Orlando.

And you're an attorney. I didn't even say I'm a lawyer.

Yes, I am a lawyer. We have the law firm. We're called Aspire Legal Solutions. That's our law firm. We changed the name earlier this year from Joseph Siegel, PA to Aspire Legal Solutions because one of our core values is be humble. And having my name right there on the billboard all the time wasn't very humble. And also our main mission for our business is to help people aspire to a better life. So I wanted to get all of that in one. So we came up with Aspire Legal Solutions. And we focus mostly on real estate transactions. We do a lot of deeding, we represent private lenders all over the state. We, I do a lot of work with title agencies, where I represent title agencies and closings, we represent buyers and sellers a lot of times in commercial closings where they're buying or selling multifamily housing or an industrial property or personal storage units, things like that. And then also a very large part of our practice deals with entity formation, LLCs, corporations, partnerships, limited partnerships, things like that. And another part of our practice that we are bringing back after many years of being away, I am bringing back estate planning to help people because I feel like that goes along with asset protection, which is a big part of our practice. And then another whole very large area of our practice is Florida land trusts, where we have a separate business called my landtrustee.com and that company, Access Trustee. We are the largest and oldest land trustee in the state of Florida, if not the Southeast. We hold well over 2,000 properties in trust as a professional third party trustee to keep our clients names off of the public record. So if anyone searches their name, they will not see the real estate that they own in Florida. So that's a very big part of, a huge part of our practice there as well. And so daily we are opening trusts, closing trusts, going through mail. Right now we're going through these two weeks, we will go through at least 2,000 pieces of mail, just trim notices, tax trim notices coming in from all over the state, getting those, then turned around and back out to the beneficiaries, the clients, and handling anything that goes along, buying and selling the properties inside the trust and all the legal work that comes along with that as well. So that's pretty much our practice. It's very transactional practice. No litigation anymore. If I can handle it, if I can help it, we stay out of litigation as much as possible. But very, very transactional, real estate, transactional based.

Right. And now you used to also have a title company, correct?

I did, I did. I had two title agencies, actually I had one PCs title. We only did title, residential and commercial title to a much smaller extent in Florida and mostly central Florida. And then I had another title agency, PCs holdings, which went by the name closemytimeshare.com and we did title deeding, owner to owner transfers, anything dealing with timeshare. And we did a lot of work for a Few very large brands in the timeshare industry because we are based here in Orlando, which is the Hollywood of timeshare vacation ownership, as it's called now. And we did foreclosures and title and deeding and inventory recovery from the Bahamas to Hawaii up to Maryland and down to Texas and everywhere in between. And I sold the timeshare title agency. We closed on the sale of that last April. And fortunately it created enough money for me to where I could actually retire if I wanted to. But I decided I'm only 53, I can't retire, so I would get too bored. But it did enable me to finally close the residential title agency right before the housing recession hit, as the interest rates went up. And I got out of residential closings by closing the residential PCs title. So I no longer issue title insurance. I don't prepare settlement statements anymore. I don't deal with getting payoffs and HOA payoffs and dealing with liens and code enforcement liens that anymore. I still know it extremely well. And that's why a lot of title agencies in Florida will contact me. I help advise them on their business, marketing, sales, operations, regulation, things like that. So I do still work with quite a few title agencies all over the state, simply advising them of what they can do to maximize their business and maximize their profits.

Great. Okay. So you do still do closings though, right?

I do closings in that as a lawyer, I represent the buyer or I represent the seller, but I don't actually prepare the settlement statements anymore. Yay. And I don't actually issue the title insurance policies anymore. I, I, I was a licensed title agent in Florida for, gosh, 20 years. And I'm finally now, I don't know if my license has expired yet, but I am letting my title agent license because that's a separate license from being a lawyer. I'm going to let the title agent license finally expire this year. I was licensed at the height. I was licensed in 17 jurisdictions across the country to issue title insurance. And I was underwritten by three or four different title insurers that underwrote me based on my opinions of things. They would issue the policies and, and yeah, we did, we did work all over the place for that. And, and I was the qualifying agent for that company. But yeah, once I sold those, the, the timeshare title agency, I was able to get out of that. But I still, and we do as a law firm, we still do closings when there's no title insurance involved. So we actually do have some people who May sell a beneficial interest in a trust, they don't sell the land, they just sell the beneficial interest in the trust and finance that. We do a lot of internal closings for that in the law firm. Also, if someone's just buying and selling a piece of land or a house or something, and maybe it's an intra family transfer and they don't want title insurance, they don't care about that, then yeah, I'll do those as a closing as well in the law firm. And we just don't issue title insurance, we don't do title search. But if they want title insurance insurance, we have many, many, many title insurance agencies all over the state that we work with to actually have title insurance issued for them. Right, right.

Okay. That's important for people to know. You still do closings though, for sure. Yeah, yeah. And so when you mentioned that you have a lot of private lenders you work with, what does that work usually look like? What do you, if you're not do it? Well, you might be doing closings for them, right?

No, we just prepare their documents and coordinate with the title company that is doing the closing because it's usually chosen title companies usually either chosen by the borrower or the seller anyway. And so our private lenders range from anywhere. It may just be an individual with a few hundred thousand dollars all the way up to funds. We have some funds that have, I think the largest fund we work with has about half a that they lend. And we just, we work with them, we prepare their documents, we coordinate everything with the title agency here in Florida that's handling the closing. We coordinate everything with the lender and we ensure that they are properly secured, that the documents are right for Florida law because every state has its own little regulations around exactly what documents have to be there in your closing package and what they can say and what they can't say and how usury works and how it doesn't. And Florida is pretty tight about all that. So we prepare all their documents in the state of Florida. Some of them, some of the lenders are hard money lenders and bridge lenders. So they use what's called our belt and suspenders package where we will, at closing, the borrower puts the property into a land trust. We are the trustee, the borrower is the second beneficiary, the lender's primary beneficiary. And then they also still execute a note and mortgage to put a mortgage on the property and all, and all of those other documents that typically go with a loan. But it just can shorten the foreclosure period. Should the hard money lender, our client, have to go in and take the property back, repossess it in a hurry they don't have. They can go through a foreclosure, but we as trustee are going to answer to the new beneficiary who is going to be the lender at that point. So the lender will just simply tell us to consent to the foreclosure. We consent and they can take the property back faster if the borrower is going to give them any pushback. If the borrower doesn't give any pushback, then the lender just goes in and through the trust itself, has control of the property. This idea actually came from mezzanine financing, where a lot of commercial lenders will require the borrower to put the property into a special purpose entity, llc and they will then take a pledge of the membership interest in the LLC so that if the borrower defaults on the mortgage, they can simply take the LLC and now they own the property that way rather than having to go through a full foreclosure if they need a really fast repossession of the property. Most hard money lenders are looking for a fast repossession because time is money. The sooner they get it back, the faster they can protect themselves, get the property renovated, rehabilitated and resold, get their money out of it and move on. So we help put those solutions together for lenders from all over the world. We have funds out of Mexico, we have funds out of Texas and New York and New Jersey who use us in Florida for their documentation and everything else that goes along with representing a lender, a private lender like that for commercial loans in Florida.

Yeah, I remember the first trust class as listening as an investor. Now it's different when I've been listening as the government representative that has to clear title. Right, right. Because we cleared our own title. But when you are dealing with a set of tools as an investor, I think it's a beautiful thing. It's really especially the way you paint the picture, how you can do your risk management by planning the way you compose. It really is a pretty thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of investors, a lot of investors use the land trust because they may just be buying, fixing and flipping a property. And if they do it all in their name, they're stupid. But if they do it in the same LLC over and over, they run the risk that that buyer may sue them down the road for some undisclosed defect that they didn't tell them about. Even if they. They sold it on an as is contract, you still have to disclose what you knew about. And if you knew you replaced the roof on the house because it was leaking and now there's mold in the house that they discover six months after they buy the house and they demand that you buy the property back from them. If the property was in a land trust by itself and that's what it was sold from, and then there's really no asset for them to go after at that point because it's already been sold. So it protects that developer, that wholesaler, that investor flipper from that kind of a lawsuit from the buyer, their buyer in the future.

Yeah, it's. It's very powerful. Very powerful. And yet lots of people do it to be anonymous. And you just did a podcast on anonymity. I can't say it.

Yes.

Yeah. Do you want to put your two cents on that?

We like for people to be anonymous. I mean, no one can go and just look up by your name all the bank accounts you have. They can't just look up by your name all the cars you have. They can't just look up by your name all of the investment accounts you have, but they can look at by name and see every piece of real estate you own in the state of Florida, or they can see every LLC that you own in the state of Florida. Now, there are other states like Wyoming and Nevada and Delaware. You can form an LLC and no one knows by searching your name that you own those. And we have a lot of people who come to Florida and they go, well, I formed a Wyoming LLC and I'm going to buy this house and I'm going to do all the work in this Wyoming LLC and I'm going to sell it. No one will ever know it was me. And my argument about that is they don't know you too much because now anyone can walk in and say, well, this is my LLC and here's an operating agreement and I'm going to sign an affidavit to the title company and now I can refinance it and put a mortgage on it, or I can sell it. We see this a lot with vacant land. Back in my title days, title company days, it was very common that vacant land was sold by fraudulent sellers and they would just basically hijack your LLC because it's a Wyoming llc or it may be in a land trust, but it's just with Joe Schmo as the trustee. And so the title company was just going off somebody's driver's license. That happened to be a fraudulent driver's license, a fake driver's license. And they were using that to sell the property, get the money, send it to. If they sent to Jamaica, it was usually heading to Russia. If they sent it to Canada, it was usually heading to China or North Korea is where it would end up. So that's, that's where they were still in the money. So your money do that. A lot of people think, oh, it's, it's real estate fraud. Somebody stole the money. But a lot of times that money is actually being used to find terrorists and war activity against us and our allies. So, you know, we take that a little seriously here. And so we don't like to be too anonymous because anybody could walk in and say that. So that's why I'm a big advocate. Of course. I mean, it does help our business of having a professional third party trustee because your name stays off the title. But who really has the right to sign everything is very open book because we're all over the Internet, we're all over the.

Everywhere, all over the records, right?

So everybody can find us and, and check with us. It's like, hey, we've got a sale going on. They're selling this property. We reach back out to our hidden beneficiary and go, are you really selling the property? And they go, no, we go, go back to the title company and go, this property is not for sale. Somebody's trying to rip off somebody or, or mortgage it. Same thing happens there quite often. Or rent it. That's another one we get. We get a lot of professional. Prospective tenants call us and say, hey, I'm getting ready to give this guy $5,000, his first and last month's rent, plus a deposit and an option price. But am I giving it to the right person? We look it up and we go, well, that doesn't match anybody we know. So we contact our client, the beneficiary, and they go, no, that's not us. That's. Somebody's busted the door and they've shown them the house and they're trying to steal their money. So we can stop a lot of that simply because people can get us and check with us to make sure that they are dealing with the right person on the property before they hand them a lot of money.

That's huge. That is. There's so much fraud out there. It's just scary. Yeah, yeah. So, okay. And so we also want to talk about the association of Realtor settlement as well. That's big time affecting everywhere. Go ahead, if you would, and touch on what's going on there.

Yeah, well, the settlement. The national association of Realtors settled a case. They were being sued in many cases, copycat cases across the country, saying that they were colluding to fixed prices and that it was driving up the price of homes because they were putting exactly what they would pay the other agent. So when a listing agent would list the house, they may list the property at 6%. And then on the MLS listing, they would put 3% or 3.5% or 2.5% or 2% or whatever will be paid to any other agent or broker who brings a buyer to us. And it was right out there in the open. And the plaintiffs in the cases argued that this was collusion because they're basically setting prices and because they are agreeing to 6%, that in essence is driving the price up by 6%. And realtors would argue, well, no, it's not, because the house is going to sell for what it's going to sell for. But in this case, we're just agreeing between ourselves that if the, if it's 6%, this is how we're going to split our commission between ourselves. It doesn't affect the buyer and seller. Plaintiffs argued, well, it does affect the buyer and seller. It drives the price up. And a jury agreed with the plaintiffs. They agreed that, yes, it drives the price up and it is collusion. So therefore pay hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. Lots of very large Realtor brokerages across the country like ReMax and Keller Williams and others had settled before the case went to trial for hundreds of millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars in some cases, but mostly hundreds of millions of dollars, with the plaintiffs to say, please just drop us from the case. And the way they settled was they said, we will not require our agents to be members of the national association of Realtors anymore. So that means that they do not have to agree to this broker compensation sharing agreement that automatically comes along with being a member of the national association of Realtors. That wasn't good enough for the plaintiffs. I mean, they let them go. But the plain still wanted their pound of flesh from national association of Realtors. Nar So finally NAR said, we got to settle this because more and more of these cases are coming down the pike and it's going to bankrupt us. We cannot handle this. So they settled and they said, okay, well, as part of our settlement, we are no longer going to require brokers to collude with each other. At all in any way to agree to pay each other a commission. So if a buyer's agent brings a buyer to the property and they procure a buyer for this listing, you have no obligation, Mr. Seller, that you ever have to pay them a dime. And the way we're going to enforce this is we're going to remove that entire section from every MLS in the country where they put in exactly what percentage of their commission or of the overall sales price that they will pay to the buyer's agent for bringing them there. So now what's happened as of August 17, it finally went into effect, the buyer's agent has a buyer, and they are now required to have a compensation agreement in place with the buyer. So in the old days, you know, they didn't have to have anything written with the buyer saying that where the buyer said, I will pay you 2%, 3%, whatever of the sales price as a fee for bringing me this to this property. Now they do. Now they have to sign an agreement that says, I will pay you. Now, in some states, like North Carolina, this has been the, the way that buyers brokerages have worked since, gosh, 1990s. The mid-1990s. Yeah, yeah. Been very common in North Carolina. Because in North Carolina, I was, I was a broker in North Carolina for decades. Actually, Since I was 18, I'd been a broker in North Carolina. And I'm a, I'm a broker still in Florida. But so I sort of know the two. But you would, as a buyer's agent in North Carolina, you would always get the buyer to sign an agreement. And you explained it to them that, hey, if I take you to a for sale by owner house, and they say, the seller just puts their foot down, says, no, I'm not paying any realtor commission. Then under this agreement, Mr. Buyer, you are agreeing that you will pay me at least 3% or 2 and a half percent or 2% of the purchase price for whatever house I find for you. And that became, you know, the, the way it was done in Florida. That's not the way it was done in Florida. Buyer just didn't get anything. You know, the buyer didn't sign anything. They didn't ever promise to pay their, their broker a dime. They, it was always understood that, well, you're going to get paid by the seller at closing, by the seller's agent. It's going to be split. And that's how that's going to work. So that's, that's really how it, it went. And what we're seeing Now, I mean, because as, as a land trustee, we sign probably five to 10 purchase agreements to purchase properties a week and we sign another five to 10 sales agreements a week. Sales agreements still operate the same way for the listing agreement, but on the buyer's side, I use. And now I get a contract to sign to say I want to make an offer on this property. I get a buyer's commission agreement to sign to sell, say that, yes, I agree, I will pay you my broker X amount regardless of what the seller will do. And then I have a seller.

I.

Forget how they word it, but it's a seller request to, to contribute X percent of the sales price to pay my broker, you know what it is and whatever that commission is. Yeah, the concession. So we're seeing that now. So it's added a lot more paperwork. It's add a lot more time. We saw this over in the commercial side for years because commercial didn't really have the mls. It was, you know, Johnny's got this office building listed and Sarah's going to show the property to her clients who happen to be looking for that office, an office building, just like that. But before she takes them, before she even tells them about it, going to call Johnny and say, Johnny, what's the compensation on this and what am I going to get paid? And Johnny's just going to snap out, tell her, oh, you're going to get 3%. You know, bring me a buyer 3%. Let me give you some more information about it. But commercial moves a lot slower than residential did. Residential has typically. I mean, resident real estate as a sector is 17% of the overall GDP of the United States. So any time you throw sand into the gears of 17% of our GDP, you have now slowed down that velocity of those transactions, which slows down the velocity of the money that can move through the system. You've now added a step and more paperwork to fill out and negotiating points about, well, what will the seller pay? This and that. But to take it the next step farther, the FTC is still not happy with this. The federal government is still not happy with this settlement. And they are making motions now to reopen a case that they already had open. They want to make it illegal for realtors to ever talk at all about commissions. They want to get it down to where, no, the buyer just pays their buyer's commission. The seller pays their commission whatever they agree to with their agent because that truly takes any discussion of commissions off the table. And they're completely discounting that. The fact that a Lot of people are buying this as their first home. A lot of people don't have six to $30,000 sitting around to pay their broker to sell them a house. Not only that, but they think that buyer's agents are going to just stay in this business and get paid a flat fee of like $1500 or $1000 or whatever for all the work they do whenever they sell a house. And I think a lot of people simply don't understand what a buyer's, the buyer's agent. They have a ton of work they have to do. Number one, they may show a buyer or houses and properties for months on end, weeks on end, at least, before they finally find the one they want. Then they've got to write up the contract. They've got to pull it together, they've got to pull up the comps. They got to make sure they're not overpriced. They got to, they got to, they got to work with. They got to show up when the appraiser works up. They're working with the, the lender, the mortgage broker, they're working with, the title company, they're working with, you know, the home inspectors, the well inspector, the pool inspector, the, you know, all these other people. And everybody's like, yeah, that's. But they don't do anything for their money. They work their butts off for that money. So. And now you're going to say, well, the buyer can pay that, though. They can. That can just be part of their fees that they pay as part of their closing, and they don't have that money. So the danger is that 1 million realtors will leave the profession and get out of the business. That is the worst case scenario that, that the government has looked at and everybody else that's analyzed this has said 1 million realtors will leave the profession. If you lose a million realtors across this country, that's a million people with experience and specialized knowledge about housing and housing discrimination and what you can say and what you can say and can't say and what you can do and can't do and what works in this neighborhood and what doesn't work in that neighborhood and what works with this lender and what doesn't work with that lender, they leave. So now you've thrown even more sand into the gears of 17% of our GDP just by taking those lines out of the MLS and just by having it to where Realtors, if they, if they do take that next step, where Realtors just sit, simply can't talk to the Other realtor and say, hey, is your seller going to pay me anything? And if so, how much? Because I want to talk about this. They, the, the federal government looks at that discussion as the same as if Pepsi and the president of Pepsi and the president Coke got together and said, hey, let's charge $5 for 2 liter, I'll charge $5 for 2 liter Coke and you charge $5 for 2 liter Pepsi nationwide from here on out. They look at it in the same way and it's really not that. It is not that at all. In fact, I mean, just over the years, I've been doing this since 1996 and I have seen, I mean it used to be standard 6%, 6%, 7 and a half, 7% commissions, but I have seen that erode over time. To see a 4% commission during the Great Recession, you know, three and a half percent commission was not unheard of. We saw all kinds of commissions drop. So to say that this has artificially kept commissions at 6% or to make the argument, well, how home prices have gone up and so realtors pay has gone up commensurately well, but also inflation has gone up as well. So it's all, you know, played together.

And the regulatory environment. Yeah.

Oh, and the regulatory environment. I mean after, after the Great Recession, you know, just the rules and regulations that they put on top of thing made anything dealing with real estate a lot slower and a lot harder and a lot more complicated. So you know, doing all that, they, they're just not taking any of this doing into account. And I would not be surprised if after a year or two when once NAR gets back on its feet. Because this isn't the only problem that rocked NAR over the past year. They've had a lot of scandals at the top that, a lot of unforced errors that were just stupid that happened. And if NAR or when NAR gets back on its feet, they were one of the largest, most powerful lobbying organizations nationwide. If they can get back on their feet, I can see them going to Congress and saying, look, we've got to come up with a law because this has slowed the GDP down just by these changes. This has slowed down real estate in the United States by 10, 15%. If they can get that kind of research together to show the hit it is taking on the bottom line of the GDP of the United States to congressmen, maybe I could see this being a bipartisan issue. Congress would say, okay, we have got to put some statutory rules around this to say, yes, this is legal. It is perfectly okay to do X, Y and Z. And as long as you do X, Y and Z, you are fine. It's no longer tradition and custom. And this is just how it's always historically been done. This is perfectly allowed and it is exempt under. And then have the SEC right rules and the FTC right rules that say, yes, this is not price fixing, this is not collusion, this has nothing to do with anything there. But I, I don't see that changing anytime in the next, you know, at least two years before we get some, some resolution of this.

Wow. Yeah, I didn't realize there was, there was that other hanging on yet still too. So, yeah, there's, there's a lot of change going on and if it does really slow down things like it most likely will, then that would be huge. 17% of GDP. You're probably reading the future there.

Yeah.

And what made me look it up was I had a, a client who also has been a broker in the UK for years and he said, well, this is no big deal. So it's been done in the UK for years. And I said, how does it work? He said, oh, I can sign a listing agreement with five or 10 brokers and then whoever brings me a buyer first wins. They get paid, all the others don't. I'm like, well, that sounds like just litigation all over the place here. But then I looked and it's something like the GDP of the UK is only 7% real estate related. And I go, okay. And their economy is, it's a large economy, don't get me wrong, it's one of the G20 countries, but it is much smaller than the GDP of the United States. Nothing is as large as our GDP anywhere in the world. So 17% of our GDP versus 7% of us, much smaller GDP. Yeah. Who really cares if it slow, if it goes a little slower? It's a big deal here. It's a very big deal. I mean, they're talking about trillions of dollars that they have just tinkered with with the snap of a finger and not really thinking deeply about how this is going to affect the entire economy overall. Because, and studies have shown when people buy a new house within that next year, a large percent of percentage of them buy a new car, they buy new furniture, you know, they, it just causes this velocity of money, this consumerism that just ripples throughout the economy. They didn't just buy a house.

17%. Yeah, yeah.

I've done it myself. I mean, you know, I buy a new house, it's like, you know what? This ratty old car I've got sitting in the garage doesn't fit this house. I need a nicer car now to go along with this house. I need nicer, newer furniture to go in this house. I need more plants, I need more pots, I need, you know, paint and everything else that goes along with it. And it just, it just drives this, it just accelerates the flow of money through the economy. So much so doing this, it's a top down ripple that we're going to see all the way through the economy. And we may not see it for a year, but if we have, with them dropping interest rates, if we still have the housing slowdown that we're going to have, you know, because people just can't. Buyers are like, well, okay, interest rates have now dropped. I've saved up a lot of money for a down payment. But now I just found out I've got to pay another $10,000 for my broker. I can't do that. So now I'm just going to drive around for weeks going to open houses and then talking just to the listing agent. And I don't know if you know a lot of listing agents. I know a lot of listing agents. Most of the really, really good listing agents don't like to be buyer's agent. I mean, they're a listing agent, they're not a buyer's agent. So for them now to have to deal with this person and they're on both sides of the deal now and they're having to deal with a buyer and their real and their broker, the mortgage broke, the appraisers, the inspectors and everything on that side and they're having to, you know, stand on this teeter totter of, well, I represent them, but I'm also representing them and I'm, I got to be careful what I say to who and when and what you know, how far I go. And a lot of listing agents are like, I'm the listing broker, I'm not talking to you about that. I'm not showing up for the, I'll show up for the appraisal, I'll show up for the home inspection, but I'm not talking to the mortgage brokers and the lenders and everybody else who's involved in all this. You know, I've got to go list another house and deal with the marketing and sell of that house. And so it's just gonna, it's just gonna slow everything down so much, I think.

No doubt, no doubt. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure You're right. It'll be interesting to see what happens. That could be. That could be a real change agent for sure. So. And we need to wrap it up, actually, I need to interview another time because we've got a few topics we didn't get to. We'll have to do a series B or something. But. But I do want to go ahead and ask you the pivotal question. Is there a pivotal person or event that brought you to where you are today or that's pushing you forward to a certain outcome?

Yeah, I think about this question a lot and because I also asked a similar question on my podcast and it's my dad. My dad was very. You have rich dad and poor dad. Well, I had the. He wasn't poor, but I had the poor dad because he worked, worked for the man. He, he worked for a corporation, a family, his entire life. And then I had my uncle who owned his own business. And my dad always said, if you want to be wealthy, if you want to have agency over your life, you have to own your own business. You can never work for somebody else. As long as you work for someone else, you will always be capped at what you can do. Another thing he always taught me too, was if you were ever given options or choices, think about which option. If you choose, it is going to open up more choices for you. Never take an option that's going to run you into a dead end. So I've always carried that, you know, my whole life with me. Another thing that he's always told us is, and it's actually etched on our, on one of our mirrors here in one of our bathrooms here at the office, is expecting what you inspect. And that comes down to expect, you know, if you are truly inspecting the work of others, your employees and others who you lead, if you're inspecting what they do, you can expect it to be high quality that you. You expect, but if you're never inspecting it, then you can expect it to slowly decline in quality and speed and, and just everything falls apart into chaos eventually. Unless you are inspecting and managing and watching what's going on, or unless you have the processes and the people in place to inspect for you. And then you're just, you're just inspecting them. So that my dad's taught me all those things and, and much, much, much more. But the big thing was, is be your own boss. Never. You can't work for someone else and ever be rich and never have agency over your life like you can, if you're an entrepreneur, always choose the option that's going to open up more options for you and expect what you inspect. Those are my big three things I got from my dad.

Great. Great. Okay, well, very good. Well, so you have a fantastic newsletter and the podcast and so tell people how they can reach you. Anyway, and remember, some of this won't be on video. It'll be audio only. So go ahead and spell it.

Yeah. The best way to subscribe to the newsletter and subscribe to our YouTube channel is go to my land trustee.com www.mymy land l a n d trustee t r u S T E E Felt like I was in a spelling bee there. But yeah, from there you can subscribe to the newsletter. It's a newsletter I do write Pull Together every week. It goes out at 8:15 every Friday morning. Has anything. If you are in real estate or if you are a an entrepreneur in any form or fashion, it's geared to you. And then the YouTube podcast, I try to give lots and lots of information. Same thing for anyone who is in business for themselves, starting their own business, winding up their own business. I have been through a major acquisition or sale of my business and also acquired other businesses. So I talk a lot about that. We run on eos Entrepreneurial Operating System Traction. So I talk a lot about principles from that as well. And so you'll I try to help again, help other people aspire to a better life by teaching them little bits and parts of things that have helped us. I'm real big on yes, I've climbed the ladder. I feel like I have reached the top to a very large extent. And I'm not one of those people who goes, okay, I got to the top, now slam the door behind me, the trapdoor behind me. I'm one of these. We all get to the top, we should turn around and give a hand to the next person behind us to help them also climb that ladder to get to a better life.

That's great.

That is.

That is very good. Well, thank you Joe. We will need to get you back here though too.