1177: Self-Management, Pooled Assets, Need for Scaleability & Time-Wealthy Investor by Mark Dolfini

Yeah, my passion for real estate really has taken over my, my passion for technology. So it's been, it's been really fun, you know, over these six years getting closer and closer into real estate to the point that I can really, you know, that it's my day job now focusing on real estate, you know, hosting, co hosting with you, the Women Investing Network podcast, which is a lot of fun, amazing guests going into that, being able to have the time to participate in the Venture Alliance Mastermin Group, which I adore, and it has added an incredible amount of value to me and then also being able to have the time to go to like I'm going to the Oklahoma City property tour that's coming up and I'm super excited about that.

Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants, and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome listeners and greetings from Seoul, South Korea. Well, I'm not really there yet, but I hope I will be. I am recording in advance here. Today we have a good episode on a topic that is near and dear to our hearts, that is self management. We're going to talk a little more about that as we help you become an empowered investor. Even if you don't self manage. It's good to know how to self manage because that gives you empowerment. If you want to delegate a task, first learn how to do it oneself.

That's what I say.

Then you will be much better at delegating the task. But even better yet, take control. Commandment number three, thou shalt maintain control. And this is one additional step toward even more control, that is self managing your rental properties. And you can do that from a distance as we have discovered and taught you over many, many years. And so we're going to talk about that today. But first for the intro to 1177. Did I say the show number 1177, we've got Adam here with us. And Adam, you have that Listener question that was kind of long that we did not get last week. Right, right.

We teased it a little bit, but this is from Brett Carey and he says.

Hi, Brett.

Jason, I've been listening to you for a while and I have purchased eight houses through your network. Congratulations, Brett.

Thank you. Thank you for the business, Brett. And congratulations.

He said, I also met you in Seattle, which was a fun trip. I don't know exactly what trip that was. Do you?

We had a Venture alliance trip to Seattle.

Okay. So his question is for the sake of contrast, he listens to several podcasts. He's loved your education and perspective. However, he's confused about one other approach. Grant Cardone makes bold claims that single family houses are not a good investment because they don't cash flow enough. He divides the total price of the property by the units it has, claiming that after the expenses have been subtracted from the gross rents, you just make more money. I think he also claims to double or triple the equity invested in the property in 10 years. It's such a stark contrast to your approach to investing. I think his sweet spot for units is at least 16 units per building or more. Is where he says the real money is made. He says, Anyway, I'm curious about your thoughts. I know you love single families. That's what I currently have. From a broad perspective, do you think that you make more money with single family houses versus 16 unit apartments or higher? Or is it that apartments are more work or a job, so that's why you make more money?

That's a multi layered question, obviously. Brett, thank you for the question. It's a good one. And you know what, Adam, we really should run that episode that I did. We should rerun this not as even a Flashback Friday. It's such core, important content. And I know that some of you, some of you who aren't being good students all the time are skipping Flashback Friday. I hear that once in a while and then I hear from you that a lot of you love those Flashback Friday episodes. So I don't know what to do. You just confuse me. But you really need to make sure you're listening, listening to all the Flashback Friday episodes because those are choice. They're really good.

I mean, Sarah was just on last week saying that a client heard him and said, oh, yeah, I need to do that in my investing.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I did this episode where I took about 45 minutes, I believe, and this was maybe four years ago where I really did sort of that Ben Franklin, if you will, comparison. And the Ben Franklin comparison is where you draw a line down the middle of the paper and you put the pros and cons of each thing right. Of single family versus multifamily investing. And I really think, look at, I own both now. I've owned many others of both over the years. And I think the single families are much better. But you know, if you're going to actively invest, I shouldn't say actively invest if you want to run a business, which is a much more active thing than investing. Right. The implication of investing is it has at least some more passive qualities to it. And look, you've heard me say many times, there is no such thing as a passive investment. You must be active in your investments. Anybody who tells you that you can buy a bunch of houses or a bunch of any kind of real estate and have passive income, they are lying, lying, lying. They are full of it. Okay? Do not trust that person. You know, I know one of those people who promotes that idea a lot. And hey, I wouldn't trust that person for a whole lot of other reasons besides just the passive income statement. So there's no such thing as a passive investment. There really isn't. We've gone over that many times before. Look at Grant Cardone sells a fund, a fund where you're violating commandment number three. It's a pooled money investment. And he wants people to invest in his fund, not ask too many questions.

Which is exactly what he said when.

I saw his fund presentation the night of the Las Vegas shooting. He says, look it, if you're going to ask a lot of questions, don't invest with me.

I thought that was terrible. But also, you know, he can get away with it because he's a famous guy. He's been on the show and you know, I like his 10x content. You know, his go get him. Yeah, I know. You know, at least he's honest. Yeah, at least about that. Like, don't bother me with questions. You know, I would never invest with someone that said that. But hey, you know, he can get away with it, so whatever. So there's self interest there, right, that, you know, he wants you to invest in his fund that buys apartments. That's what he does. That's his other business besides being a motivational speaker. And the single family homes are just simple. They appreciate better. They have a lot of qualities that are much better. You get a much better quality tenant, they get much better financing. They are just better in so many ways that I've discussed so many times over the years. And Forgive me that I don't have that Ben Franklin episode up in front of me, but Adam, let's find that one. Let's rerun that because that really answers this question that Brett has in a lot of detail. But worse yet, and look like I own this 136 unit apartment building now, right? That we are trying to sell it with my partner. And that deal is so flipping complicated. It is unbelievable the amount of attention that requires the apartments. The other one that we had required tons of attention. You know, you gotta manage Yelp reviews, you've gotta do all kinds of things that you don't have to do with a single family home. The tenants are so destructive too in these apartments because they're so transient. They just don't care. It's just a whole different business. And it is a business, you know, having apartments, that's a business. Having single family homes, that's an investment. It's a much different thing. It's really not even comparable. The only comparison is they're both real estate and they're both housing. It would be like saying, I can invest in the stock market or I can buy a business and run it. Totally different concept. And that's almost the comparison here. Because running an apartment complex is a business. It is a real business. It has some investment qualities to it, but you got to run that actively. And if you think here's a myth that I believed for a while, I thought, well, when I graduate from single family homes to apartments, which by the way, I have done to some extent, but I still have and love my single family homes. When I graduate and become a big time investor, I. I'm going to get to deal with better quality managers, better property managers, these property managers that manage big assets like big apartment complexes, like my 136 unit complex, right? They're going to be just a better quality manager. And that wasn't true. We got one manager that we're thinking of suing now because he ripped us off, the last manager. We're probably not going to bother. But I mean, you get totally crappy quality managers just like you do with some single family homes. And you're not going to be self managing your apartment complex very easily. It's just a different deal. So let's rerun that episode because there's just too many questions to answer about that. But with the Grant Cardone thing, he's asking you to violate commandment number three, thou shalt maintain control. You're investing in a fund and you know, Grant can pay the cost of all kinds of costs that he can layer onto that fund business. The cost of his private jet that he owns, that he flies around in, you know, he's gotta travel to the properties. I don't know, you know, I don't know what kind of expenses he's putting through there. I'm not saying he's doing that, but he could do it. I don't know because I just don't know. And you're losing control. These fund sponsors and these syndicators, they can take so much money off the top and of course they do. You have to assume that everyone is always going to follow the money and that everyone is always going to be acting in their own self interest. In fact, to even take it further, everyone's going to be acting not only in their own self interest, but their own massive greed. So when you invest in any kind of pooled money asset, a fund, a syndication, a stock, a mutual fund, whatever, right, you're relinquishing control. You're violating commandment number three. And the three major problems you encounter, you all know them. You might be investing with a crook, you might be investing with an idiot, assuming they're honest and competent, which are two big giant hurdles. If you pass those two, then they take a huge management fee off the top for managing the deal. So I wouldn't do it. I didn't do it. I saw the presentation, looked interesting for about five minutes and then, nah, you know, if I can't ask questions, I don't want to be investing with you.

So it's pretty simple really. If you look at the cost per unit and the cost per square foot of an apartment versus the cost per unit and the cost per square foot of a single family home, you're going to pay more for the single family because it doesn't have shared walls, obviously, right? So your rent to value ratio on that apartment is going to be better, but the likelihood of appreciation will not be as good. Now, in the apartment, you can do some things to add value by very, very much actively managing it. Okay? I mean, there's a lot of complexity to this. We just got to replay the old episode because it really went into detail on a lot of this stuff. But yeah, your rent to value ratio is going to be better on apartments. So what, your cost of tenant turns is going to be higher, you're going to have more vacancy because the tenants are going to turn over more often, they're going to have shorter stays, it's not going to appreciate as much. You can have big repairs, you Got to have a whole management team. It's just a whole different deal. It's like buying a business versus owning a stock. It's a different thing. And I'm not saying it's good or bad. I'm just saying understand that it's a different thing. That's what you need to know.

All right.

Okay, Adam, let's get to our guests and talk about empowered investors and self management. And we'll be back tomorrow with another episode.

Let's do our self management week.

It's my pleasure to welcome Mark Dolfini to the show. He is author of the Time Wealthy Investor. He is a veteran of the the U.S. marines, teaches people how to be a better landlord. He's known as the landlord coach. Mark, welcome.

How are you?

I'm great. Thanks so much for having me. And I'm really excited to be chatting with you guys today.

It's good to have you on. You know, after doing this for 14 years and helping investors invest in properties nationwide, I am becoming more and more convinced that the best way to do this is to self manage one's properties. Now, if you have a great property manager, that's fine, keep them. But if they're mediocre or bad, it really is something to consider that investors should self manage properties. And like I said to you before we started today, you know, if you told me 15 years ago that I could manage a property 2,000 miles away, a property I never seen, a tenant I've never met, I would have said, you're absolutely nuts. You know, but nowadays there's so many great pieces of technology available to us that it can be done. Many of our clients are doing it. I've certainly done it. I think it is something to really, really consider. So I want to make an army of real estate investors out there more and more empowered to disintermediate and to be able to directly manage their properties long distance. And amazingly, you can really do that and you can do it quite well nowadays. Talk to us, Mark, if you would, about some of the best practices in landlording.

Preaching the choir. I mean, I completely agree with you. I think that there's a lot of property managers out there that are just unfortunately they're, they're just not good at it and they, they really don't treat their fiduciary responsibility like they should be. So I really agree with you. I think that there's a lot of capacity out there that people can do it if they set up the proper infrastructure. The problem that I see with a lot of people that are trying to do this on their own is that they're not treating it fundamentally as a business.

Right.

Most times when I hear people, particularly landlords or investors that are self managing that are no running in tenant problems like well, I can't get my tenant to do this and I run into that and of course I'm chasing rents and all the typical problems that you hear about investment properties, I always have to put it back on them. And I say, you know, well, you know, okay, your tenant called you at two in the morning. How do they get your phone number?

Which by the way never happens. But okay.

You know it's funny, it's funny how these, these myths developed. I guess everyone saw the movie Pacific Heights and yeah, I guess there are a few. There's like, you know, 1% of the tenants out there can be a nightmare. But I've never received a call at 2 in the morning ever. And I've had hundreds of self managed tenants. I've never heard of that happening in real life. Just like the same story of the all the lawyers that want you to buy a thousand LLC and set up all this elaborate asset protection. What if the tenant slips and falls? Well, out of the hundreds of tenants I've had, I've never been sued by a tenant. I've never had a slip and fall. I've never even heard about any investor ever. Out of thousands of deals we've done, having a tenant slip and fall. Is this stuff just a big myth or what? I don't know, it's funny. It's like folklore. It's Bigfoot, it's a Loch Ness monster.

To a certain degree. Yeah, to a certain degree I would, I would, I would agree. I think a lot of times, especially when you're talking to an attorney, they're spending an awful lot of time really, it seems like not looking out for their best interest or at least, hey, instead of setting that up like you're talking about, have you talked to your CPA about this? Because my goodness, you've got all these LLCs now that you're basically generating this giant tax preparation bill at the end of each year and really what are you doing? What have you preserved? But in that particular case, going back to the phone calls, it is not really a problem. I mean you're talking to a guy that Self managed 92 rental units on his own. I had $6 million worth of real estate and the problem was if I did not have infrastructure, I didn't have infrastructure to really carry me when I was going through all the things that I was going through. And this is of course, back in 2008. And the biggest problem that I had was a lack of infrastructure. And that was where I had way too much reliance upon single points of failure where everything was being run through my cell phone. Just as an example, getting calls in the middle of the night. I know it's happened a fair amount of times to me, but the thing that I realized was I gave the tenants the access to do that, the right to do that, because they had my cell phone number. Where with a simple tweak, One of the easiest things where you can gain time back right away for a very low out of pocket cost is to set up A, an 800 number where tenants can call in or prospects can call in to check and see what your available rentals are. So if you have a number of rental properties, you know, just find yourself spending time on the phone, which each rental call or prospect call seems to cost me anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes, depending on their story. It was just a huge time burden. So my focus is to get people where they're rediscovering time instead of just trading their time for money. You know, going out, speaking to residents when they should be talking to qualified residents. So just a quick.

You're talking about renting your properties. Okay, so let me just explain something to you so you'll know our listenership a little bit. The approach we've recommended to self manager management is the hybrid approach where you hire a property manager on an a la carte unbundled basis for unbundled services to manage all tenant turns. Or you hire, you know, maybe just a regular real estate agent in that market to manage the turn. So what they will do is they will go over and meet with the existing tenants that have given notice, collect a copy of the keys from them, they'll walk through the property, they'll take pictures, they'll manage any people that need access to the property. In between, a painter, you know, a handyman, whatever. And then they will do all the marketing to lease the property to a new tenant. And so our clients probably won't be advertising properties and taking calls for tenants. However, I will say though, that I do think, as I've mentioned many times before, every investor should, should have a good set of photos for each one of their properties. And it never hurts, even if you have a manager to list your own property on postlets, which aggregates to Zillow and a whole bunch of other sites, maybe even on Craigslist and you can just receive all those email leads and simply forward batches of them to your property manager or your agent. And you know what that does? It kind of holds them accountable. It shows them. Look, you got all these leads on your property. Here they are. You're handing it to them on a silver platter. Why haven't you leased my property yet?

And not only that, you're helping them get other properties that they have leased. I mean, if anything, they should want that.

Right, right, right. Because you're producing leads for their whole.

Right. I mean, because they're. Because you're going to be generating more leads than they can possibly get to. And that's. And that's a great idea because when you can leverage your time and there's certain property managers that will certainly do that. They'll just do it. Or even real estate agents will do that just for a simple finder's fee.

Sure, yeah.

So it doesn't necessarily have to be a property manager. So as long as I like using, I could use a. Back in the early days when I was starting to leverage my time, I actually got in front of several young, brand new fresh stamp on their real estate license. I use those types of people because they were trying to build a book of business and get credibility. So I got in front of those people and gave them a frequently asked questions about my lease that. Here, here's my lease. If you've got any questions you can answer directly off of that. And then had them go out because they were also trained in fair housing law. So they weren't going to go out and say things that were counter and not and not helpful and potentially put you in harm's way when it Fair housing. So definitely worked out well whether it's a property manager or a real estate agent. Those are two industries that you can look at. And usually. And right now there you've got real estate agents out there breeding like Catholic rabbits because there's just so many people that are just running that way.

Yeah, there's always some many real estate agents. So you got a big market of people. A lot of them will help you for free. That's all great. You said at the beginning of this discussion today, Mark, you said treat it like a business. I want to expand on that idea a little bit. Talk about some of the specifics of doing that. And folks, this applies to you. If you have three properties or 30 properties or, you know, 70 properties, you need to treat it like a business, even if it's just a couple of Properties. Okay. Just have the business mindset. So what you were saying there is you can set up a phone number. Heck, this is free. I mean, I think they closed down Google Voice, but there's lots of other websites out there that'll just give you a free phone number. It's not an 800 number necessarily. The 800 number is good if you're producing leads for rental, but most of that's even done by just email now from a website anyway. It's not even a phone involved, which is so nice. It makes it so much easier. In other words, a number that goes to a voicemail so it's not a direct call and it doesn't interrupt your life. Okay, all right, we got that idea. What else? Any other tips like that?

The main thing is whatever you want to do and you hit the nail on the head where you're saying whatever you're doing, you know, three units should not be three times more difficult than managing one unit. And 30 units should not feel like 300. You want 30 units to feel more like three. So it really, that's the main thing is whatever you're setting up in place, it has to be scalable. So when I sat down and I wrote the time Wealthy Investor, I was thinking about that from that from the individual landlords perspective and my story, and again, everybody's story is going to be a little bit different, but my story where, you know, I had these 92 rental units and I was just absolutely time weary. It got to the point where 92.

Is a lot of units. Were those all single family homes or were some apartments?

Most of them were single family dwellings.

Okay, so you had 92 families, 92 properties. And were you doing, trying to do that all by yourself or did you have you know like one employee or two or anything?

Yeah, I tried, pretty much tried to do it by myself and I was failing miserably. I was in still with a good work ethic. So I just figured I just need to try harder because I wasn't, you know, working.

That's a lot of properties. You know, like the bigger, the bigger investors that we have, you know, that have lots of properties, a lot of them will hire like one person to help out with it, to do the bookkeeping, to, you know, manage the insurance policy renewals and things like this. You know, this is something that you should always consider. So yeah, go ahead.

Right. And from that aspect, I think that hiring a person is, from my aspect, it was, it forced me to do something that I had not accounted for at that point in time, and that was to get everything out of my head. So a lot of people right now, this is very, very common is the use of a virtual assistant. And although it wasn't very prolific, you know, when I was going through my MAS back in 0809, it's much more commonplace today. And you can get them very, very cheap. I mean, you can find them. I believe it's the ivaa.org, you can find some there. Or another company is CCMyAdmin. I mean, you can get them to pretty much do anything that you want for a fraction and you just pay them by credit card. And you don't have to pay employment taxes, you don't have to pay work comp. It's fantastic.

And you get a lot of freelancers. We, we work in the gig economy, folks. You can also use sites like Upwork and there's a, you know, a zillion others out there. So that's ivivaa.org which is the International Virtual Assistants association, otherwise known as V. VAS Virtual Assistants. And you know, they're located all over. I would definitely recommend people onshore in the US you can certainly get really inexpensive ones in the Philippines and so forth. We've never had any good luck with that, but some people do. So.

Yeah.

Okay, good, good. So get a va. And you know, the great thing is too, you can hire them for very limited numbers of hours. If you need someone for two hours a week, you know you can do that.

Right? And the important thing about this, especially with using a VA, is it's really going to focus, force you to start thinking about the tasks that you do and being able to scale them. So when you got a VA that's coming to you with a question that you're high. I mean, just because you give a VA a task does not mean that you can't bring the task back to you to do it if it proves too difficult to do or too time consuming. So you can always try that. But it really forces you in a way to start thinking about your business as a business. And that's really your first employee. So you have to start thinking like, well, you know, even if they just managed my email in and out or something that you said earlier was, okay, so you post on postlets. Well, that's something that they could do. All you have to do is write the script. Once you tell your VA hey, by the way, that one's vacant or it's going to be vacant in two weeks, they post that or they can Manage.

All the responses or. And you know another thing, like you talked at the beginning here about the specific phone number for your quote unquote business of managing properties. So you can have a specific email address. Just set up another email account and you know, maybe you have that email forward to both you and your VA and make it a generic email. Give yourself a little name for your little business. You don't even have to have an LLC or anything, but you could if you want and do that and then simply use that email address as a generic address, not a person's name. You, you know, it could be info at rentals by Charlie or whatever. Yeah, yeah. And basically you can forward that to both parties or 10 parties if you have 10 people on your team or two people, you know, yourself and your VA and you know, you both kind of know what's going on and just say, look, the VA is responsible for responding to all of this and you know you're going to see all of it. So that's, it's great. You can just monitor it really easily.

Yeah, absolutely. And tasks like that will start to grow and well, when you're realizing all the things that they can do because it's their job, I mean it's in their best interest to show their worth to you. So they're going to be doing things. And you can get some very highly skilled moms that just happen to want to work from home, that are bachelors and have bachelor's and master's degrees, but they want to, they want to be home with their young children until they want to go back into the workforce again and, but they want to feel productive and you get everything in between. I mean it's, you know, you get some old, you know, sometimes you have to kind of work through the turds a little bit, but other times you really have some fantastic, fantastic high performers. You just gotta, just gotta know how to work with them.

Yeah, good stuff. Okay, what else?

So the last thing I like personally is I like finding some sort of management software. So I know there's a lot of people out there who try to manage it through their Excel spreadsheets or their QuickBooks. QuickBooks is a fine accounting system, but it's for accounting. I have a background in accounting, my.

Degree is in accounting.

But yeah, it's just not good for managing when you've got that.

So what do you use? What do you recommend?

Someone's own you money personally for the low volume user I like, I know there's Appfolio and Buildium and out that out there. I'm not a big, those are more.

For the big managers. Those are people that are in the business of managing other people's properties.

Yeah, right. And I would agree with that. Ones that I like is from National Tenant Network. It's NTN Online. Okay, NTN Online now NT National Tenant Network, they actually provide a screening service but they will provide that software for you if you use their screen, if you use their tenant screening. So it's free to use the low volume user. It's fantastic. Their screening reports are fantastic and you get a fairly robust system that doesn't cost anything. All you do is you pay for the screening. So I really, really like that software.

Tell me about the management component. So that's to screen tenants. But what is the software that manages the properties and stuff? Tell us about that.

It's very similar to what you would see with a property management company but it is actually for the low volume user, it's for the individual where you're going to have it broken out by property and then by resident you can use it. It's not like as if it's built for a property manager. If this is built for people who are, you know, maybe one run, one or two reports per year, I mean so it is for a low volume user, but it is, it's just what you would expect.

But again, I'm not talking about the reports, I'm talking about the property management system software. So is this the NTN Secure Manage, that's the name of that product probably, right?

That is correct. It's called the Secure Manager.

Okay, so the features and benefits of this, I'm looking at their site, you know, you can market the properties, collect application fees online and automatically track applicants, can eliminate redundant data entry, track expenses, provide residents with online rent payment portal. That's nice. Just like the big institutional landlords. See it folks, there's all these tools out there nowadays. It's great. You can manage, consolidate your owner, resident and property information, reducing time and money spent on administrative tasks. Fully integrated, seamless access to all NTN screening reports. So they're in the screening business and they offer some software on the side it looks like. So that's great, good stuff. That's ntnonline.com of course all of our listeners have heard about the company company that I with my partner bought a few years ago, Property Tracker, which does some stuff and nobody's blended this all together where it's all in one place yet. I'm sure Property Tracker does a lot of stuff that this doesn't do. And this does a few things Property Tracker doesn't do. So you kind of have to use a few things. But ultimately the one thing you can always rely on is that everything's just getting better all the time. So good.

Very true.

Yeah. Yeah, good.

Okay.

So in what else? Other best practices.

So the main thing that fundamentally, and I know we've been talking about a lot of infrastructure and a lot of specifics and tips and tricks, but the one thing I would, I know we're coming to close here pretty quick, but one of the things that I always, always work with my coaching clients with is making sure that they have a clear vision for where they want to go, for where they want to, where they want to take their business to take them. So that's probably first and foremost because again, you could be setting up all this infrastructure, but if your vision for the future is to be sitting on the beach and spending time with your family, you can't have infrastructure that is going to be requiring you to have constant input where you're going to be returning emails and phone calls on a constant basis. So if you are going to be self managing, make sure that you have an absolute crystal clear of your vision for the future. So when you're setting up your infrastructure, you can set it up with a mind towards that. Because that's going to be just like you would with having a set of core values in a business mission statement, if you will. It's the same exact thing of having a vision for your future and for where you want to go. Just think of your business, your real estate business as a vessel. And if you're trying to get down river, well, a canoe is a good vessel for doing that. But if you want to get to the top of a mountain, dragging a canoe to the top of the mountain isn't going to be very fun nor very enjoyable. So that's really something that I really like to make that point, if I could, about making sure that you have a very, very crystal clear vision for your future. So you know really where it is that you want to wind up and where you want that business to take.

You want to have 50 rental properties, know that make some time goals, some smart goals as they say, and smart is an acronym, right? And make those goals and that's a good plan so that you don't get derailed by the day to day challenges that we all have in any part of life. Any other apps or technology or websites that you want to share, share as resources you shared some good Ones ntn, et cetera. Any others?

The. One of the things that I like personally is because there's lots of technology out there that can be used. But one of the things that I particularly like to do, and this is something that many property managers do not do well, and this is why I think that they struggle if you can get them to do this at any change of possession, is do a video. Have them do a video at every change of possession. So in other words, when the resident moves out, you have someone go out there and you do a video. In the video, they have to hold the proper orientation. You know, they don't shoot vertical videos and you have to explain this to them.

That is such a pet peeve of mine. Turn the phone sideways the right way. Like your television set. Your television set does not hang portrait style or vertical. It's horizontal. The same. No vertical video aspect ratio of your.

Eyes in your head.

Okay, it's horizontal. Horizontal, thank you very much.

You're killing me. Exactly. That's exactly like our eyes are horizontal.

Why are you, why are you shooting vertically? Yes, you moron.

Right. Drives me crazy.

So sometimes you have to walk through this with people and you have to be very specific. But oftentimes they will often pan the rooms too quickly. So you have to walk them through that and say, hey, look, I really need you to take, you know, if you've got a 1500 square foot, three bedroom, two bath and they do it in six minutes, that is way, way, way too fast. They need to be looking about a 15 minute video. They need to be deliberate, they need to be intentional as they're walking through and they're scanning rooms, they're scanning the walls and then set up a Dropbox account where they can put that video and link and you can link that video to one another. So what? So you may have end up paying a few extra bucks, but you know, what you want to know is at every change of possession, so when the resident moves out, you get to see the good, bad and ugly of how they left the property. And when you take a video when they move in, you get to see the finished product of it being painted and cleaned and the carpets replaced. Because you don't want to be throwing good money after bad not knowing that the work has actually been done. I think if more property managers just did that, they probably wouldn't have the problems that they have. But of course they don't. They don't have the infrastructure for that. So if you can get them to do that, that would be a huge win because then you could say, oh, okay, yes, I saw. Or hey, wait a minute, I thought I paid for that swing set to be removed from the backyard. And you see it in the move in video and you can say, oh, hold, pump the brakes. Something's not right here. And that is a huge difference. And that's one thing I outlined in the book and how to do that and how to be intentional with that because that really can save you a lot of grief. And of course you don't have to fly across country, you know, to go visit the property just because you're not 100% sure what got paid for and what didn't.

Right.

But if you do, you can take an at least partly tax deductible trip too. So you may want to go there on purpose. Yeah, good. Good stuff. Hey, give out your website, Mark.

It's landlordcoach.com hey, thanks for joining us.

And the book is entitled the Time Wealthy Investor.

Right, The Time Wealthy Investor. And I'm getting ready to release the second edition of that, but they can get that on Audible right now. And I'm also going to release a shorter version which is just kind of a primer called the Judge Landlord's Tale. So either one of all of them are available on Amazon or through the website at Landlord Coach or they can like it also like it on Facebook.

All right, good stuff. Hey, thanks for joining us and happy investing. Regain control of your properties, folks. Really consider self managed hybrid approach of self management. Thank you for sharing some of these good tips with us today, Mark. We appreciate it.

It's my pleasure. Keep your foot on the gas, everybody.

Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss any episodes. Be sure to check out the show's specific website and our general website, hartmanmedia.com for appropriate disclaimers and terms of service. Remember that guest opinions are their own and if you require specific legal or tax advice or advice in any other specialized area, please consult an appropriate professional. And we also very much appreciate you reviewing the show. Please go to itunes, Tunes or Stitcher Radio or whatever platform you're using and write a review for the show. We would very much appreciate that. And be sure to make it official and subscribe so you do not miss any episodes. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.