177: Reducing Tenant Turnover Costs, Investor Education, Immersion & Mastermind Power

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This is Heroic Investing Episode 177. Hey, on this episode I get to be put in the hot seat. Your guest on this one is Gary Pinkerton. This is Jason interviewing me a couple of years ago and we're talking about my experiences as an investor through the Hartman Network, but just with all of my properties. We talk a little bit about selecting some durable replacement materials as you do make readies or some minor remodeling inside your properties. Talk about preventative measures that I've learned and used over time to help reduce tenant costs, keep tenants in my properties for longer. I'm a firm believer that vacancies are the biggest killer of cash flow and wealth for real estate investors, bar none of. And so we talk about how to do things like incentivizing two year leases, which I just did again on my property down in San Antonio, get some built in rental increases for that second and subsequent years and then just how to immerse yourself in the investing culture, specifically by connecting yourself with masterminds, with going to education events. So I just thought this was a really good one and timely. Hopefully you find this one helpful. Please continue to give us feedback at either heroicinvesting.com or just directly to me at garypinkerton.com thank you so much. And we have many, many more great episodes stacked up in the wings here, ready to fly. So looking forward to many more episodes together and a great 2019 today.

I want to welcome back to the show our client and venture alliance member, Mr. Gary Pinkerton, former nuclear submarine captain. Gary, welcome. How are you?

Thanks. Thanks Jason. I really appreciate it. This has been two or three times I've been on and it's always humbling, but you know, I feel like it's an awesome experience. So thank you for inviting me back.

Well, thank you for joining us. And yeah, so you retired from the Navy what about a year ago now?

Pretty close, Yeah, I stopped working and officially it was August 1st, but almost exactly a year ago when I finished in uniform.

Well, during the Great Recession, you know, we heard a lot about people being underwater. You used to Be underwater, too.

I did. I did. But it wasn't an accident. That was on purpose.

That was on purpose in that submarine. That's just such an amazing thing. You know, Gary, I tell you, we have got to line this up as a Venture alliance weekend trip. You got to take people onto a submarine sometime. We got to make that work somehow.

You know what? I could. I think we could totally do that just as a tour, and I could guide the tour. Whoever's on duty on the ship would probably appreciate me doing it instead of them doing it. But, you know, it would be a great opportunity to kind of add just some personal insight to it. I think it might be a great tour. And anytime that we line this up near one of the coasts, we could do that.

I definitely want to do that. And you know, what we've got to do as part of our. This would be a great Venture alliance mastermind photo op is if we could, you know, have one of our Venture alliance members stand at one of those keys and another one you see at one of the keys. You know, in the movies how you turn the key to launch the nuclear missiles? Can we launch a couple nuclear missiles just for fun?

No. And in fact, we're not even going to get that photo, I don't think. But it's a good idea.

Well, they do it in the movies. It looks pretty neat how they do it, you know. Is it really like that, by the way? Is it like that you got to turn two keys or it gets. Probably not like that anymore.

It's pretty close because there certainly is a whole lot of redundancy and backup and more than one person involved, which, I mean, if you think about it as. Now I'm a private citizen with some. With a family here, and I'm really happy the fact that there's a whole lot of backup before, you know, before we make those kinds of decisions. So, yeah, it's pretty similar.

Yeah. Wow. Interesting. Very interesting stuff. Well, hey, Gary, you said something to me today that I thought was really important. You know, we were using voxer and voxing back and forth. The best way to communicate ever invented in human history. Voxer. We were doing that this morning before we started recording the show, and you said that you wanted to talk about something that's really, I think, super important to real estate investors. I'll borrow a phrase from poker, thinking of Keith, our Venture alliance member, who's the professional poker player, and it's called the turn. The turn. Okay. Anyway, that's important to a real estate investor because this is the area where you, you just lose money and it's on the tenant turn. So it, we've talked a lot about this over the years, of course, but it begs the question, what can we do to number one, keep tenants longer. Number two, make those turns between tenants. I'm talking about the time between the tenant when you may have to do a make ready to get the property ready for the new tenant. This is something that can really eat up, you know, eat up a lot of your return on investment. And the turn is vitally important. So the first thing on the turn, I think we want to say to our listeners and investors is don't have the turn. Okay? So try to avoid the turn completely, the tenant turnover and keep the tenants there, but don't do that at the risk of being one of these dumb landlords that doesn't maximize yield. There's a balance between these two, right? You want to increase rents, but not enough to motivate the tenant to move, obviously. So maybe let's talk about that. But let's also talk about what can we do to make our properties more bulletproof so that it's cheaper so that you don't have to spend a bunch of money on the turn. And the other thing is we have this constant issue, Gary, of the property managers, if you're not self managing your properties, okay? Now this is something that if you're self managing, you're not going to run into it as much as long as you're not wimpy with your tenant. Don't be wimpy with your tenant, okay? You know, be a business person and a, have expectations for them and make them live up to it. And here I'm talking about security deposits, okay? But with property managers we have this inherent kind of conflict of interest. You know, there's an old saying, you can't serve two masters, right? And property managers kind of do serve, well, two masters and then themselves. So they, they serve the owner that's truly their client, okay? That they have the fiduciary obligation to. Hopefully that's a fiduciary obligation. I don't know if it trul in every state, but it's an obligation because the owner is the one paying them, right? And that's who the contract is with. And, but then they also have the tenant and you know, they don't want their name all over Yelp and all these complaint sites when they are aggressive, or maybe not even aggressive, but force their, the tenants to uphold their part of the bargain. So if they, you know, if they damage the property, the property manager can be reluctant to charge the tenant for repair items. Okay. And this is one of the reasons I really like self management, one of the many reasons I do like it, you know, and maybe whatever else you want to talk about. And of course, you're a very experienced investor. You've got many properties that you've purchased through our network and you know, you've been investing with us for years. So tell us about some of your thoughts and experiences on the turn.

Yeah, so I've had quite a few recent experiences. I've also had a lot of conversations with Fernando. And everyone I think is very familiar with Fernando and he and I, it's really funny. My hat is off to that, that guy. He and I went to the venture, excuse me, the Meet the Masters in 2012, and we were both basically starting right there. I went a little bit different direction with a couple investments, syndicated things that I participated in. I wish I hadn't, I didn't lose a lot, but you know, kind of long story short, and then I'll get back to the property management. Fernando went directly into properties and has, you know, quite a few more. And so he's seen this a lot more than I have. And. But I'm starting to see quite a bit of the turn as well. And I think to kind of generalize things, what seems to happen when you get a, you know, recently rehabbed property and a BMI class kind of neighborhood, whether it be a, you know, a fourplex or a duplex or even a single family, is that there's this churn at the very beginning because you don't always have the best tenants in there. But the thing is that when you do get that really good dependable tenant, eventually it may take the second or third time. Then when you get that tenant, you got to recognize that you have that tenant and you don't really want to lose the tenant. And they will typically stick around on their own because that makes them a good tenant. And so there's a lot of churn at the very beginning on a property, it seems, and then you settle into. I had somebody for five years and then I had somebody for two years, and then, you know, maybe it was another one year one, but then I jump back in and I get a three or five. So it's real important to find that person and then do things that is necessary to hold onto them. But also, as you pointed out, don't be wimpy, don't be a bad business person. So for example, I Have a class A building in San Antonio that I bought before, you know, I joined the network several years ago. I had a tenant there that was really good. But the market had, you know, she was there for two years and this spring it came due for her to renew her lease. And she said, listen, I just haven't been keeping up with the rental increases. So I actually lowered her rent. Not raised, but lowered it by $50. That put us about 150 under market. But it's a class A building, so that's not a large percentage. It's like less than 10%. And I let her renew for that year, but we did a two year lease, so the next year was higher. And so that helped me not have to have a fifteen hundred dollar turn. It helped her not have to spend money to move. But most importantly, I had been to the property recently. I knew she was taking care of it well. So it was, it was a win, win for everyone. If you go to like a, you know, I have a property in, in Memphis for example and you know, I have several properties there and this is a bad egg, but I have several good eggs. This one I got in October and put a 24 month lease on. And so now we're approaching six months in the tenant.

Right, right. There is one way is to do two year leases.

It works, right?

That's something. Well, yeah, nothing, hey, nothing always works. Okay. But as a general rule, I believe you should try and do two year leases on your properties. Okay. And if you want to, you can build an escalation into that contract. It doesn't mean you're leasing for, you know, say the property's leasing for a thousand dollars a month. It doesn't mean you're committed to $1,000 a month for two years. You just say the first year is $1,000 per month. And, and the $1,030 per month. Okay. And that's pretty easy to do, you know, to have an escalation built in. That's maybe, you know, 3%. Right. 30 bucks. So yeah, go ahead. So two year leases. First, first, first rule. Yeah.

Right. And I like the idea. Right. And this isn't a new idea, but I like and have had good experience with the concept that you always want to, and you've said this a lot, Jason, that you always want to have your clients with the understanding that rent will go up each year when it's renewed because the market economy inflation is going to go up in most areas. Right. So a small, right.

Your tenants, your tenants. And, and, and and, and get them, that's very good, Gary. Get them used to that. Like you're training them, okay. Even though it's just a minimal increase, you're putting it in their mind, right? Planting that seed. That, that's just normal. That's what happens. Rents go up, okay?

Right. In this one property, 24 month lease, recently rehabbed. I mean, it was newly rehabbed in October and the tenant never once paid on time. Right. So we knew from the beginning, my wife sue does, you know, the books for this and she kept telling me, hey, we're not going to want to keep this tenant around. But the other thing she said, and this was really insightful, she said that, hey, the management company in this case, and this is not uncommon, the management company is keeping all of the, all of the late fees, which is fairly standard. But again, it goes against this idea of the manager and the owner having our interest aligned.

Because what's it say? Conflict of interest. I hate that part of it. We've spoken out about that a lot. And what we mean there, folks, is that when the management company keeps 100% of the late fee. Well, follow the money, right? What's their motivation going to be? It's going to be to, to make the tenant pay late fees. And that makes them predatory on the tenant, okay. It's like incentivizing them to have this bad relationship with a tenant. Now tenants are late, okay? I mean, that happens. But you don't, you know, you don't want that to be such a high profit motivator for the management company. You know, $50 late fees every month, 5% of say, $1,000 rent, right? You know that that's a big difference. When the management fee is only 100 bucks a month, for example, or 90 bucks, and they get a $50 late fee, you know, they're going to almost encourage that. They're going to train them to be late and then the tenant feels like they're getting ripped off. You don't want the tenant, the tenant, ultimately you mentioned it, but like, is your, they're not really your client. But you said client and they are your customer. Okay? So you want to have that relationship. Good. You don't want the tenant to feel like you're ripped off every month.

Right, Exactly. And so, and sue even mentioned she's like, this guy is paying later and later every month. And so he would scrape together 150, $200 and 100 of it would go, or 75 of it would go to the management fee, and then he Would leave there dejected and, you know, upset that, hey, I scraped that together and it didn't pay off even half of what I owe this month. And so you can just see it happen. Well, eventually here in the beginning of May, we get a notice from the property manager and this was our first indication that the place was vacant. He said, hey, your property's vacant. Here's your make ready. The make ready was $2,300 and the place just, you know, got rehabbed in October. Now there's some contributing things to that. One of them is that they made the client. I'm sorry I said it again. They made the tenant, the customer, very upset every time he had an experience with him. And he did no favors in trying to keep that property in good shape. But also, you know, there were some mistakes on the rehab that, you know, should have been things that should have been done that were fixed in this round. And it was a fresh set of eyes from the management company. Didn't happen to be the same company that did the rehab. So, you know, some of that 2,500, I will admit, is, you know, stuff that needed to be done at the beginning, but about 1500 of it really wasn't. So if we go, Jason, back to where you were, you know, we were talking about what incentivizes the management company. They, you know, they placed the first tenant, got paid for that, they got a ton of late fees. They're going to get a really nice, you know, 15% markup on all of the make ready's. They're going to get to place another tenant. So, you know, that's fairly tough. And I think the way around that, again, some of this, when you get a new property, you just have to keep working and making sure that, you know, maybe you get involved in who they place there and ask some questions. I do that often. So I think, you know, you just turn through it. But. But how do we prevent that from being expensive, I think is one of the things we want to talk about. Right, that, that term.

Yeah, yeah, no question about it. Okay, so, you know, I want to make a comparison, as you were speaking, Gary, about your experience with the property managers and the late fees. Do you know what some of these property managers are? They're kind of doing. They're basically running almost like a. A payday loan business.

Yeah.

Or a payday check cashing business. That's not, you know, cashing your check at a bank. Right. These fees are just exorbitant. And these people live hand to mouth. You Know a lot of them and there are a bunch of very expensive financing options. You know that the term predatory lending comes to mind because that's almost what it is where you know, these, these people are not financially sophisticated and they're just trying to get by and you know, you put them in a position where your tenant is basically spending 5 to 10% extra per month just because they're late on the rent. And it is this vic cycle. You know, I almost sound a little bit like a socialist here, you know, but, but it's really, it's not fair. You know, it's not fair. I'm going to stick up for the tenants. It's not fair to the tenants. So one of the principles that we constantly talk about here on the show and in all of our teachings is you've got to have an alignment of interest. Okay. And if, if you, if you don't get control of the relationship and you do decide to have the property managers, which is fine, there are some great managers out there and there are some bad ones too, no question, like anything. But if you don't get control of that relationship either by self managing or just controlling the property management agreement and relationship there and making sure things are in alignment, you know, your interest and your tenant's interest and your manager's interest should be in alignment as much as possible. I won't go into that because we've talked about that deeply. It could take, you know, another hour, but you know, in past episodes it's there. Go to jason hartman.com. you can search terms like that. Property management, flat feed, property management, alignment of interest. There's lots of discussions about that on prior episodes. But. But yeah, how can we minimize cost of that, that tenant turnover when you have it?

Well, I think first, you know, the customer is always right. Right. And you can't always say the tenant. Give the tenant whatever they want. That's not really what I mean. From the manager's perspective, the owner is a customer and the tenant is a customer. As you commented, they kind of work for two people. So I try to prevent the vacancy if I can do that to begin with as an example. And then I'll get to how do we minimize the cost? But I have a property in St. Louis, a very good tenant and they'd been there on a two year original lease, paid always on time, very, very good tenant, taking nice care of the property. But it had a roof issue, so a little water damage over time. Some door hinges need to be fixed and you know, some other pretty, you Know, minor things re caulking the bathtubs. And so they basically said, hey, we'll sign another lease. We'd rather not increase because there's problems here in the property. And I said, well, if you don't sign again, then I'll be able to fix all those properties and raise the rent substantially quite a bit above what they paid. And so we kind of came to basically an agreement. They said, well, we can't afford to raise it to the market rent right now. So instead of me paying 2,000 to 2,500 to do a turn on a property that it's been quite a while, so it would probably cost that. I said, hey, I'll take care of the highest priority items for you, kind of a mini turn cost. And then they went up partway on the rent and I got to retain a really good renter. So that book is not yet published, but I'm hoping that that's how it comes out. It seems like that's where it's going as far as, you know, as far as. What can we do? You guys have already. Jason, you've already talked, you and Elizabeth both about some really good options, and I'm starting to put those into place. You know, so the, the wood laminate floor is a great option. I even had a property there in St. Louis where we were gonna put that in, but that extra expensive fifteen hundred dollars, my property manager said, hey, you know, the guy who does the make ready for us just recommended that we just pull the carpet and we paint it, because that's standard for the properties where we are here in this loc. Being able, you know, having a good conversation with a manager that you trust and that you have good rapport with, they will save you a lot of money because they know the area, they know what's expected when the tenant, the potential tenant, comes in looking to rent your property.

Yeah, okay, so that's all very good stuff. So you want to make the property, the physical condition of the property as bulletproof as possible. And you were referring to our client and venture alliance member who's been on the show, Elizabeth Embry, who, by the way, is hosting another show, the Women Investing Network. So check that out as well. And.

Yeah, and she's doing a great job at that. But Elizabeth talked about the, you know, the laminate floors that the flooring, I mean, you know, it's an amazing time to be alive. Right? New material sciences, better flooring. That's much cheaper to maintain over the long haul. It'll cost you a Little more than carpet in the initial part, but in the long run, it'll be a lot less expensive. So I did one of my houses in San Antonio. You know, it came up, it was like six, seven years I owned it and never replaced the carpet or anything. And it was finally just time to do it. Once this last tenant moved out, it was about a thousand dollars more. And I did the entire house in the wood laminate. And that house has now got bulletproof flooring. Okay. You know, if, if there's a tear in that flooring, it's really easy to fix it and replace it. I don't think you should do the dark flooring. I think you should do kind of a middle tone. Okay. Color is an issue, of course. You know, when it's dark, number one, it shows all the dust and number two, makes the rooms look smaller because darker rooms look smaller, of course, and lighter rooms look larger. And then the other thing that I'm a huge fan of is on the paint. You either do low sheen paint or you do, you know, the. More like enamelish paint. Okay. Eggshell is the name of the finish, not the color. Eggshell is a color, but it's also a finish. Okay. So lotion or eggshell finish paint. And rather than flat paint on the walls, which scratches and, and just any little thing looks awful. Okay. On the flat paint, you do the low sheen throughout the house, you know, on the walls and the scuffs and scratches and fingerprints, they just wipe right off. You know, you can just a cleaner, any household cleaner, you can just wipe it off. And those walls become very durable. And I just think back to one of my own houses in which I lived the last. That's. Well, actually the last house I lived in that I owned back in Orange County, California, which I, I talk about when I teach people about the LTI ratio and the Hartman risk evaluator. That's the house. Okay. I lived in that house for seven years and I put eggshell finish paint on it. And that paint looked good for seven years. And I was not easy on it. Okay. So, you know, make the walls bulletproof and the flooring bulletproof by doing those two things. Things, okay, that'll really reduce your, your long term costs. So you gotta spec that out. You know, if you're, if you're buying a property today and that local market specialist in our network that you're buying from, you know, they do different types of rehabs, right? And they always want to deliver you the house at the lowest price. But you may want to tell them, look, I would like to spec this out at a higher level. I want to, I want to spend, you know, 200 bucks more and I want low sheen paint throughout. Okay. And I don't know what the exact cost will be, but you know, it'll be a little more. And I want to do the laminate flooring, the sort of wood looking laminate flooring throughout instead of any carpet and make it a lot less expensive. So I think those two things are very valuable.

I agree, I agree. And the only other thing, the two other, I guess quick things, again, kind of market dependent. But I have a couple markets, San Antonio and, and for, for reason, St. Louis. There are areas where the air conditioners every year have substantial problems, air conditioners and heating systems. And so I have gotten into a routine where I pay for that. I'm sure everyone has experienced where some local, either your property manager or if you've ever used a heating service that then they contact you, but they offer this, you know, this come check it out at the beginning of the season, very nominal fee of $75 or $100 or something. I'm using that now because, because when your air conditioner fails or when your heating system fails, it's when mother nature has tested it and it's tested every other one in the area too. So you will pay out the no's. Your tenants will be extremely unhappy because it'll be delayed in getting response because they're busy with every other house that just got tested. So I do that now and I've gotten good experience and haven't had the crises that I had every year before that. And then the other thing I would say is don't be hesitant to use a service something like HomeAdvisor. I love HomeAdvisor. I'm self managing a property in San Antonio, Texas from New Jersey. And I use HomeAdvisor all the time and it's incredibly inexpensive.

Tell us how you use it. What do you use?

Well, I've used it for appliances, a stove broke, a dishwasher broke. I've used it to have a gentleman work on, replace, you know, the control valves in a bathroom. So just really for any maintenance service I simply just put in what the problem is and the zip code and, and you can choose whether you want people to call you immediately. That's typically what I do. And three different people providers will give me a call. A couple of them will head out to the property. There's, you know, sometimes there's no visit charge, so it's not a big commercial about them. But there's, there's other services available but don't be hesitant even with.

Sure there are. And of course Angie's List is one of them. The problem with Angie's List, at least last time I was using it, I don't really use it anymore, is it was all localized by zip code, you know, and we're, we're nationwide investors so, you know, we'd have to join Angie's List in each of our markets where we own properties. And, and that's, you know, Gary, that's one of the great things too. Nowadays you can do this with a couple clicks of the mouse, right? You can, you can basically run your real estate empire, you know, nationwide, yourself. And there's so much transparency now that was not there. Think of all I want everybody listening to, think of all of the tens of millions of real estate investors over the last few decades that have made fortunes investing in buy and hold rental properties and they didn't have this kind of ease of use and transparency that we have today. It is an amazing time to be a real estate investor. Okay? You don't need to rely on some estimate from a property manager or a contractor. You can easily compare things. No one can BS you anymore about the cost of a garbage disposal or a cost of whatever because you can go to Home Depot's website and you can find out yourself, you know.

Yeah, exactly. And that's what I was going to say, Jason, is that I would not hesitate with those services available like that. And the great experience that I've relayed to you that I have every time with it this, I wouldn't hesitate just, you know, checking your doing this. Even when you have a property manager, for example, in that property that went vacant early, one of the things on the make ready was that the dishwasher seem, seems to be broken, probably needs replaced. And when I asked them, could you explain that? They said, well, we couldn't get the door open. And so their estimate was $450 plus 15% markup. And I said that's okay, that's okay. I'll take care of that myself. Right? And I have yet achieved that. The person's coming next week. But what I fully expect is that the door was stuck, you know, or even if not, it's still going to be far less expensive for me to put a brand new one in than have them go do that. So it was simple. Again, it was a click of a mouse. So just another thought on how you can reduce, turn by Just a little bit of personal involvement. That took me 10 minutes.

Yeah. And you know, and it might even take you less than 10 minutes too. You know, it's really, really amazing. Just have the discipline and the initiative to do some of this stuff. And at the very it is going to, you know, we're all about the empowered investor, right? Giving you the tools, whether they be the software tools that you can find@like realestatetools.com okay, the software company Fernando and I purchased a couple years ago. So you know, great tools there. The, the other tools you can find@jasonhartman.com and helping you be the empowered investor. And one of the things you do, even if you don't actually take any of these things to the finish line, if it's just an email, and here's an example of how it plays out, you get an email from your property manager or your tenant and it says this and that and a lot of your tenants, if you're self managing, you'll find your tenant to be incredibly helpful to you where they will do a lot of the legwork for you. It's amazing to me how well that works. You know, the tenant, a lot of times, you know, they'll say, hey, I already called someone and, and they're coming over to look at this, you know, this repair item, right? And the property manager might say, hey, we got a complaint from the tenant and you know, we need to fix this. And you know, then they have someone go out and take a look at it. If you Simply go to HomeAdvisor or you go to, you know, the Home Depot or the Lowe's website and you look up this item and just copy the link and paste it into the email and say, well, I checked the Home Depot website and it looks like we can get the, this part for, you know, $52.36, right? The, the property manager or the tenant are going to be, wow, this guy's on the ball, okay? And, and even, and here's a little secret. Even if you're not on the ball, you want to fake it till you make it. You know, you want to make them think you're on the ball, that you are a sophisticated investor who's not going to put up with a bunch of crap and overcharges and you're not going to pay nose, you're not lazy, you're gonna click your mouse a few times and do a search or two on whatever it is and you're going to be the empowered investor, okay? Simply by sending that One email that you will change the nature of the relationship, that, you know, that email that shows, look, you're not just taking their word for it, you're checking things. Okay. And that's going to make you a much more successful investor.

Absolutely. So I promise to the audience that I will keep checking into this. I mean, reducing the turn is kind of becoming a passion for me because I think it's important, you know, very simple numbers. If you were making, you know, net $250 a month on a property and you were in this process where it was because it was the property manager's best interest to turn it every year, not even offer a renewal, you know, then you would be setting up to make $3,000 a year. Right. Well, if your turn is 2,000 every time, because you haven't thought closely about how to reduce that, that's not a very good profit. There's a lot of other dimensions to real estate that make it very valuable, but that one cash flow would not be a good one in that scenario. So we have to figure out how do we extend this out to two or three years between turns and how do we get that turn down to 1000, maybe 1500? I think it sense. Makes a huge difference.

Yeah, very, very good point. Well, Gary, I know we were going to talk about a couple other things today, but we have run out of time as. As. As usual. But I think this is an important topic. And thank you for sharing your case study as a client with our audience again, we really appreciate it and we're going to have you back on soon. We've got a couple of news items we want to talk about. About the disappearing middle class. Absolutely. About Mr. Zuckerberg, the biggest invader of privacy in human history besides the folks at Google. And, and what he thinks. You know, I think he's got political aspirations. I can see a Zuckerberg presidential candidate and he's. I want to. I want to talk about his universal income stuff. You sent me an article on that. That's fascinating. And we like to talk on the show about the macro and the micro things. Okay. Because they're both important. You know, the big picture stuff, stuff societal, government, political, and then the detailed tactical stuff like reducing the cost of tenant turnover. But, Gary, before we go, you know, I just want to ask you about some educational stuff real quickly and maybe share your thoughts on investor education with people because you, like so many of our clients, have been really just very motivated about sort of being in the culture, if you will, staying in the loop, coming to events and being really involved. And we've got two events coming up, and you're coming to both of them. We've got our Venture Alliance Mastermind event. And you were like, I think our third member of the Venture alliance that's coming up in Chicago in June. So it's what, about three weeks away, I think. And then we've got our Oklahoma City, Jason Hartman University, JHU and Property Tour combination coming up first weekend of July. What are your thoughts about those two events?

Well, Venture alliance has been a really, really stretching process for me, you know, from all aspects. You know, I mean, it's not inexpensive. And you did that on purpose to stretch people. And it certainly, you know, worked in my case, you know, especially three years ago when we started this, or two years ago. And so it has caused me the stretch, it's caused me to raise my game. And the people I've gotten around have been far more. What I've learned from them and shared and the experiences has been far more than any monetary cost. It's been for me. And I think everyone else who tries this would experience the same thing. So I certainly invite everyone to come join us. And the bigger our group gets, the more value that gets added to every one of us. So I'm one of the most motivated people out there trying to tell others about it, get people to join us, because I'd love to have a bigger group even. I'm learning a ton here and getting a lot of value. But it would be better, you know, if I just think about Keith and Chad, you know, Keith being our, you know, our poker player and Chad one of our local market specialists, the most. The two most recent. And John, I mean, my gosh, some great people that I've learned a ton from. So Venture alliance, really awesome. On kind of on the other side, more on the basics, go to school stuff with JH University and the area tour there in Oklahoma City. Very excited to go back to that. But for me, you know, repetition is the mother of success. And, you know, Zig Ziglar had a quote, and I know you his, you may know his quotes better than me, but it was something like, you can change your world or you can change your results by what you put into your mind. And so I go to those kinds of events, the conferences, to education events that you put on Jason for two reasons. One, because for that quote, by what I put in my mind. So if I. If I'm continuously putting that information in my mind, thinking about it, going over how it. Why this process Makes sense then it keeps me focused on that and it kind of keeps me on target. But it also, you know, refreshes things that I've forgotten in the past or you know, paths I wanted to go down but kind of got distracted. But then the other quote about you are the sum total of the five people you spend the most time around. Well, I want to spend my time around.

Quote, yeah, that's right.

I want to spend my time around guys like you and Adventure alliance, but also people who are long term investment wealth creation minded. And everyone in that room is like that. So for me it's amazing. It's rejuvenating for me. But it's also that repetition of learning.

You know, when we had our Venture Alliance Mastermind weekend on Jekyll Island, Georgia, the, the birthplace of the Federal Reserve and you know, we had G. Edward Griffin speak at our last Meet the Masters event and he's been on the show show several times as well. The, the author of the Creature from Jekyll island book. But I'll tell you one of the things that my mom said, my mom came to that event, I think that's the only Venture alliance event she's been to. But she said, she said to me afterwards, she said, Jason, you know this group you have is so stimulating. They're constantly like reading books and going to conferences and learning things and, and they're just, they're just so engaged in life. And she just said she couldn't believe how stimulating that was to sit around the boardroom table, interestingly in the room where they founded the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve Room at the Jekyll Island Hotel and Resort or Resort and Club or whatever it's called where we stayed. And she said her mind was just expanded from that meeting and that's what the Venture alliance is all about. So, so you know, up your game. I mean, you know, get, take it to the next level. Check out Venture alliance mastermind.com for that or, or just go to Jason hartman.com click on events. You can find information in both places and we'd love to have you involved in that. You can always come as a guest to those events on a one time basis, of course. The property tour and Jason Hartman University event for the weekend and the first weekend of July on Saturday and Sunday are in Oklahoma City this time. So you'll see properties, properties are in short supply. Inventory is very scarce.

That's for certainly for true or that's certainly true.

No, no question about it. But we'd love to have you join us for both of those events, folks. So check those out. Jason hartman.com and venture alliancemastermind.com and Gary, thank you so much for joining us today. Appreciate having you on the show and appreciate, appreciate you being so giving and willing to share your, your personal experiences and your your case study as a client. We appreciate that. So thank you.

Absolutely. Thanks so much. I look forward to round two when we finish up what we were going to talk about.

All right, everybody, we'll talk to you on the next episode. And happy investing.

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