Sonrisers: Major Hillard with MH Estates

Well, good morning, y'.

All.

You are at sunrisers. We're so glad to have you here. It's a very active morning. People are in cars, running on treadmills, and it's just an exciting day. I get to move my mother into her senior independent living facility today. I've been doing a little bit all week, but today's the big data. Move her over there. So lift my mother, whose name is Charlotte, up in prayer. If you think about it, I would really appreciate it because she's not as happy about it as I am. Moving is really, really difficult, especially when you're 86. It's. It's so hard. I can't imagine what it's like for her to have to do this, but she knows she needs to, and. And it's a great place. So, anyway, keep her in your prayers this week. I really appreciate it. Tom, my dear friend, are you ready to get started? And if everyone would mute themselves, that would really help me.

Well, as always, good morning, guys. It's always a pleasure to be with you. On Friday, this lesson here is going to read this story. A house church in the city in the Soviet Union received one copy of the Gospel of Luke, the only scripture most of these Christians had ever seen. They tore it into small sections and distributed the pieces among the body of believers. Their plan was to memorize the portion that they had been given, and then on the next large day, they would meet and redistribute the scripture section. On Sunday, the believers arrived inconspicuously in small groups throughout the day, so not to arouse the suspicion of the KGB informants. By dusk, they were all safely inside, windows closed, doors locked. They began by singing a hymn, quietly but with deep emotion. Suddenly, the door was pushed open, and in walk two soldiers with loaded automatic weapons at the ready. One shouted, everybody line up against the wall. If you wish to renounce your commitment to Jesus Christ, leave now. Two are quickly. Two to three quickly left. Then another. After a few more seconds, two more. They say this is your last chance. Either turn against your faith in Christ, he ordered, or stay and suffer the consequences. Another left. Finally, two more, in embarrassed silence with their faces covered, slipped out into the night. No one else moved. Parents with small children trembled beside them, looking down reassuringly. They fully expected to be gunned down or to be, at best, to be in prison. After a few moments of complete silence, the other soldier closed the door, looked back at those who stood against the wall and said, keep your hands up, but this time in praise to our Lord. Jesus Christ, brothers and sisters, he said, we too are Christians. We were sent to another house church several weeks ago to arrest a group of believers. The other soldier interrupted, but instead we were converted. We have learned by experience, however, that unless people are willing to die for their faith, they cannot be fully trusted. We do not live behind the iron curtain today, of course, but our world is filled with confusion and hopelessness and does not need any more half hearted, half believing Christians who have the title but not the lifestyle. There are too many of them already. Jesus, who is calling us for absolute surrender, is the only way that we can make a difference in this world. We cannot blend into the culture. We must stand out from it. Are we committed to Christ and the kingdom or are we just going along for the ride? This reminds me of a little story about the hen and the pig who wanted to do something nice for the farmer. He had been faithful to take care of them and they wanted to do something special for, for him in return. So the pig and the hen discussed what they should do. This hen said. He said, I got it. We'll provide bacon and eggs for him for breakfast. The pig thought about the suggestion and replied. He said, there's only one thing wrong with your bacon and egg idea. For you it only requires a contribution, but for me it will mean a total commitment. And the question is, you know, are we ready to give Jesus a total commitment? You know, in Romans 12:2, you know, here's a story about that where the scripture says, Paul says, therefore I urge you brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice. I just want you to think about that for a moment because in the Jewish customs before you would bring, if you were a good Jew, you would bring a dad offering to God. You know, whether or not it was a turtle dove, whether or not it was a lamb or whatever it was, it was one where at that time God accepted the dead sacrifice. But here when Paul talks about this, listen to what he says. He said, therefore I urge you, not the world. But he said, for brothers and sisters. And he said, why? This is why. It's like the, the chicken and, and the, and the pig about how good the Master has been. He said, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice. And the thing I heard one preacher say one time was the problem was with, with this scripture was that we believers keep crawling off of the altar. We get up there for a few minutes and we said, we're here Lord, and we're ready to just give you our lives as a sacrifice. And in the next few minutes, we. We crawl down off. Off the altar and we go back in the world. But Paul says, as a living sacrifice, hosing holy and pleasing to God. And then he tells us, he said, this is your true and proper worship. This is not something that's extraordinary. This is not something that's, that's, that's humongous. He said, this is just your true and proper worship. And listen to what he says. He said, do not conform to the pattern of the world. Do not conform to the pattern of the world. You know, we could take a glass jar, whatever it is, what, whatever type shape it is, and we could fill it with a liquid. And that liquid will conform completely with the figure that we have poured the water in. And that's what Paul is saying to us. He said, let's. Let us not be individuals and people and believers who conform to the world. The old saying we had in, in business. When you're in Rome, do as the Romans do. You wait for them, farm, be like, be like the Romans if you go into this country, you know, blend in, Be like, be like them. Don't, don't stick out. Always kind of blend yourself in. But the scripture says, do not conform to this pattern. But like he said, but be transformed. You know, the transformation is a whole different process. It's not one that can be just done by we, by someone saying something. The transformation the scripture talks about, that is a caterpillar that is able to make this transformation and become a butterfly. He no longer looks like what he was before. He no longer crawls on the ground, climb, crawls up a tree.

He.

He's. He has now been one that has changed himself where he's able to fly above the ground, above the trees. It's a transformation that God is asking us to do. And, and he tells us, by. How do you make this transformation? Is there a machine, is there a liquid that you get into that does this? Paul says we make this transformation by the renewing of your mind, of our mind, of our, our inward spirit. We can make that transformation from the caterpillar pillar to the butterfly. It's. It has to be one where we are all in the biometry.

And he says.

Then you will be able to test and approve what God will is his good, pleasing and perfect will. And, you know, as, as I started to do this, this lesson. And I, I mean, it happens every time you start to get in the scripture. And you, you know, you're not Reading it just to read. You're reading it to understand it. You're reading it, you know, to be able to comprehend it. You're reading it to be able to tell someone else about it. And when you start getting into changes, you immediately, if you start reviewing your life and your. Your goals and everything else. And it's just one. Where. Is this where I need to be? Is this where God wants me to be? Am I. Am I absolutely in. Am I. Am I the chicken here who can give you this egg? Or am. Am I the pig that's willing to give you my all that. That I won't ever have to give back again because you have it all? And so that's the question where we are. And I know sometimes people will say, you know, we emulate people. And we said, well, we don't see anyone else, you know, doing that. I. I don't want to be so. But above the. The crowd with my life, you know, I don't want to be, you know, in my neighborhood. And people said, don't talk with him, but don't talk with her. You know, they're. They're all always talking about Jesus. They always quoting scriptures. They all. They're always doing this, you know. You know, I. I don't know whether we want to be around them because, you know, they're not normal. They're kind of abnormal people. And. And, you know, they. They may not be fun to be around. And sometimes we hear that and we come sometimes, you know, cut back and say, well, I just want to wait until the right time to be able to say that. But Paul is saying this transformation is one that you can't hide. You can't. You can't hide from being a caterpillar, you know, to a butterfly. You. You can't hide it, you know, you. It's you. And this new you is who you need to be. Because you're not doing it anymore for the audience of the world. We're doing it for one, the audience of God. And so he. He tells us, but by the grace given me, I say to everyone, do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you. For just as. For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not have the same function, so in Christ, we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs all to the other. Just like this house church in Russia is one that we together as a body of believers, become Christ. In totality, we have different gifts. We may be the finger, the fingernail, we may be the hand, the arm, the feet, the mouth, the head, but all us together, you know, working together in unison. Being in the body of Christ can win souls to Christ. We don't have to be the whole body. We don't have to be the believing that we are the only instrument that God has to do that do our part to live with the gifts that God has given us. You don't have to go back and try to find new gifts. When people start talking about talent. The other day our minister was asking about, you know, the talent, you know, that you have gotten from God. And I thought about it. I said, you know, really, I'm not a singer. I'm not a dancer. You know, I said, things may not come to me real fast. And I said, if I have a talent, it's persistent. I say, I love the part about being the termite that eat woods wood seven days a week. It's nothing spectacular. It's nothing super about it. It's. It's persistency and consistency and who I am and what I do and, and if you can do the one thing are the two things that God has given you, that ability to. It may not, again, may not be in a talent that everyone can see singer, dancer, whatever business person, but whatever talent God has given you to be persistence in that. And I'll say, as I would say to me, I got to stop pulling myself off of the altar and, and then read the Scriptures. And I said, boy, I got to get back on the altar again. I'm. I'm ready now, Lord. I'm. I'm ready now for the 9 million times to be. Be on the altar to. For you, to be your. Be your glory. So I know that's how it is for me, and, and I, I know that's how it is for all of us. But Paul again says, present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, not to someone else. Holy and acceptable to God. So my encouragement is just be faithful and be faithful all the time. And as the person said about the Russian kgb, if you are fully in, then your commitment is there. If you're not fully in, your commitment isn't there. And that's where you have to examine yourself. And scripture said to see if you're found in the faith, whether or not your commitment is there. Let's pray. Father, you're great. You're wonderful. Father, you're awesome. And yet, Father, for humans that you, you love Us enough to even count the hair on our heads, Father. And to know us intimately and. And to love us, Father, and always be there to help us. And always, Father, be at our door, knocking, asking whether or not you can come in. Father, you. You are doing your part. You have done your part, Father. Give us your strength, Father. Give us a determination for us to do our part. Father, let's. Let us increase the number in heaven, not, Father, by our life. But Father, how we go about to be able to minister to those that we come in contact with. Father, let our. Let us allow our light to shine, Father, that can bring glory not to us, but to you. Father. We praise you this morning through your son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Amen. You know, I love the way you.

Were.

Talking about, you know, seeing people that you want to emulate. I got home at, I guess it was about 10:30 last night from taking the, you know, a load over to my mom's, excuse me, new apartment and just dealing with all the emotions that she's going through. It's just been really, really, really tough. And I'd crawled into my bed and I'm sitting there decompressing, and my son Alex knocks on the door to come in. And my first thought was, oh, man, not him. Because this kid walks with the Lord like nobody I've ever seen. If you've met my son Alex, you, you know, it's got a big smile on her face.

She knows.

Yeah, you've met him. He's just unbelievable. And I didn't want him to come in and pray for. Pray for me and pray with me. He does it every night. I didn't want him to because I was wallering in my self pity, having a great little party, you know, feeling bad about my mom, feeling bad about myself that, you know, I'm the one encouraging her to move. But he's also that same guy that I wish I was. I wish I had his. I wish I had his faith. And I'm striving to have his faith. I've had him walk up to me before and I've thought to myself, like, you know how you try to avoid insurance people trying to sell you something. I've thought, you know, I can't take. I can't take his Jesus right now. This is my son, you know, that I'm. That I'm thinking about and, and I'm. I probably shouldn't admit this in front of all y', all, but I would assume that y' all go through this too. I hope you do where it's just, you know what, not now. And man, I want to get rid of that feeling. I just, I love the way you're talking about how you emulate other people. It's, it's, it's hard, it's so hard to constantly remind yourself 24 7, he is in us, he is with us. The spirit is throughout our body and it's so easy if we just let go.

Amen. Yeah, when I think that's a key there is, is letting go. I think that's the hardest human hang up we have is to just let go and be in, be in submission. And that's, that's hard. And Satan knows it's hard. He, he, he wants us, you know, to pull up our bootstraps and we can do this and we don't need any help and we don't have to go to Jesus every moment and every day and our strength is okay by itself and all of these, you know, foolish things that we go through and, and that's why, you know, Jesus is coming to me. All you who are weary and heavy laden, you know, and, and I know what you're going through with your mom. I, I did that back in, I mean many years ago and mom, you know, passed in, in a, in a rest home. And it's probably not a day out of a week that goes back by that. I wonder, did I do the right thing? You know, should I have paid for a person to come in and kind of just keep, stay with mom during the day and, and everything else like that? Did I, did I do the right thing? And one of my former persons used to drive a bus for us many years ago. And he was saying to me, he said, well, you know, when I put my dad in, he said, I knew I couldn't keep my dad 24 hours a day, but he said I, I was at that place night and day, unannounced and everything else. And I said, Rick, you know, that's the same thing I did. I said, I, I went to the place where mom was sometimes. I went three times a day. I, I went 5am in the morning to see how the night shift was doing. I would be there at breakfast when they were feeding. I would be there with lunch when they were feeding her. I would be there at dinner time when, when they were feeding her. And I said, so I said, I may not be here 168 hours a week, but I, I'm going to make sure that I know how things are going most of those days because when you look up, most times, you will. You will see me. So instead of me doing it by myself, I said, you will be. You will assist me in taking care of my mom. And that gives me breaks during the day, and that gives me breaks during the night, you know, for me to refresh myself and do other things and still be committed. So, I mean, that's something that. A trial that, you know, you won't ever get over until we're around the throne. Because no one knows what the right answer is.

Right.

That's the problem. No one knows what the right answer is.

Right. It is. It's tough. And we'll. We'll all get to this point at some point in our lives, right?

Well, we hope we do. You know, that's the good thing about it, is that if your parent is still living, you know, then you. You got a chance to do for them as they have, you know, done for us. And so that's. That's a good thing. And that's great for our children to see how we take care of their grandparents, because who knows, one day they may have to do the same thing for us. So it's a. It's a. It's a good picture for them to see how we treat their grandmother and their granddad also.

That's a great point. That's a great message. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Always wonderful. Brian Maddox. How are you today, my friend?

Wendy? Sweet. I'm doing wonderful.

How's Chase?

He's doing great. He's just been. He's on his recovery week. He starts back in on Monday with chemo. But it's just awesome to see him, you know, be a happy, go, lucky, silly, goofy kid when he's feeling good. So it's been a nice week at home.

Good, good.

Yeah.

And then Monday we'll start. And this is the last big push, the last hurrah. Might kick his butt a little bit. We expect he'll be in the hospital around May 8th to 10th for maybe a week and a half to two weeks, but we'll find out, and then hopefully we're kind of in on. On the easy street for next year and a half, so.

Good. Good.

Yeah.

Praise God.

Praise God. God is good. We are blessed. And Wendy, the market, it's not as blessed. It's not been quite as blessed. Tom speaks about all kinds of cool things, and I just get to come, and I still think we might want to reverse the order so we end on a more wonderful note. So I'm Gonna share my screen, give you some good data.

Share.

So we've gotten a lot of mixed reports in this first quarter. Gdp, gross domestic product came in low versus the estimate. That was kind of good news in the markets. Spending is coming back a tiny bit. So we're seeing some weaknesses in some of the numbers. PCE came in a little bit stronger and then the core PCE came in a lot stronger when we looked at that core pce. So we've got a new core PCE number coming out today and we're hoping to see a little bit of a decline year over year from last year. Just how the numbers work and they use rolling averages. So if you look at the Fed futures, the kind of current estimate, there's about a 59% chance. We'll see a rate cut in September. November is a 67% chance and December an 80% chance. Then I found a whole bunch of different data on the housing market and I thought it was worth sharing some of this. Some markets we're seeing, especially South Florida, we're seeing more sellers than buyers. So we've seen a shift in the market in South Florida. They're having a tremendous problem with insurance in Florida. If you're not paying attention, insurance is getting a little crazy, taxes are getting a little crazy, and it's really starting to drive people out of the state. So just being aware of what's going on out in the housing market, there's something like, I think it's 70 million square feet of US office space being converted into multifamily, mostly apartments. That equals 1.7% of the supply that's getting converted over. So that's just a new source of housing for affordability. Hopefully that will be coming down and that trend is supposed to continue. This is an interesting thing. I found housing, single family housing. Shifting of where investors are buying. So here are some of the top markets of where more single family housing is being gobbled up by investors versus the areas that are declining. And here's kind of a visual map of that same data. And I can post this link in the chat when I get off. When I get done speaking, I'll post this link. So you can kind of come through here and look at this. But it's kind of interesting to see where investors have left or vacated and where they're concentrating. And that Southeast and the Northeast seems to be huge in investors kind of migrating where they're buying building. We've seen a couple of different numbers for building come out year over year. Building was increased 8%, 8.8%. There was actually some revision of the numbers from last time and I found this. The number of houses built to rent is up like 300% from 2019. So we're seeing a lot more production. And when we look at.

When we.

Look at the building numbers, when we break some of the things down, it's showing that new construction is at an eight month supply right now. Wendy. And the highest for new construction supply was December, I think 2009. We saw like 12 months supply. And so that's probably why we're seeing these, the permits and the start slow down because that new construction inventory is starting to grow, which is you wouldn't think when you've got sales that are increasing year over year as well. So just some mixed numbers out there in the marketplace. Application volume is really down a lot right now because of the higher interest rates.

We're lower.

I saw a chart somewhere and I couldn't find it for this meeting. But the new applications, that's a predictor of what the single family housing market's going to do, right? How many people are buying existing homes. So some mixed bags of things. We're seeing the summer, spring sales season kind of increasing. There are more listings coming on board.

So.

But the time on the market, you know, the time on market has shrunk and the multiple offers and the percentage of houses that are closing above listing price have increased. So again you're looking at some numbers that suggest things are slowing down and other numbers that are suggesting that they're doing great. So I think it's, you know, continued rollercoaster. Hold on and let's see how this, this market unravels as we move into the summertime.

Yeah, it's, it is so strange. So I just put a mobile home, a new mobile home on the market, sold full price in three weeks and it's 229. Nine is what I sold it for. So I was surprised it sold that, sold that quickly end up full price. Now I am paying some closing costs on it, which normally I would not have to do that, but you know, of course I'm happy to do that. So a couple of things. The other thing you talked about new construction as hard money. As a hard money lender. The majority of the loans that we're doing right now is new construction. Isn't that spooky? That is, I think, and I'm going to want to get Anna's take on this too. I think there's the reason why the permits are down is because it's so difficult for the bigger builders to build affordable housing with the cost the way the costs are right now. So the, the, the houses that are being built are of course the bigger ones and the, the people that can afford these affordable houses to build those affordable houses are the single onesie twosie guys that are finding great deals on lots and able to put that deal together. And then the other thing too that I wanted to definitely bring Anna in on is you mentioned office space going into multifamily. What are you seeing on that Anna?

Sure.

Good morning. Yeah that's, that's great data by the way Brian I always appreciate the charts that you share. So on construction Wendy one yeah building costs are really high. So I had three properties in development phase in Texas. We stopped on two of them. They're in hold, they're on hold because the numbers just don't make sense anymore. So we with multifamily or single family large multifamily, you know a few hundred units. And so the biggest issue is not just the interest rates but the lenders have cut their LTVs they're offering substantially because so many regional banks are already so heavy in commercial real estate they're nervous about what they have is going to default. So they've been pencils down for over a year at this point almost a year and a half. So we had pre approvals that two banks came back to us and said we love you all, we love your plan but our board won't let us lend more than X. The other thing on the big properties is it's usually not one bank, they co broker it. So just like insurance has reinsurance, you know I reach out to First National Funding of Texas, they contact three different banks. I want 100 million, they each give me 25. But they're, they're being my face. Right. Well their sources of other regional banks that partner to do these big loans are pencils down on commercial right now till they see what happens. So they said we'll still do the loan but instead of 75% LTV it's 50% LTV. So you know when you've got to raise 50 million for $100 million loan I got to get the rest from investors who want 20% on their money. Well you know going from 5 to 11 on construction plus paying half of that to investors that 120 they I can't build them for the cost. So that's why so many are just pencils down. It's kind of that, that dual thing. The other thing is in order to build and make it somewhat affordable. Part of the build back better plan essentially for new. They incentivize building apartments but you have to be energy efficient and pay prevailing wages. Now you get tax credits if you do that. But without those tax credits construction costs are just too high. So I think there's going to be a huge slowdown. Unless they offer more tax incentives for affordable housing, you just can't build them affordably enough. So you know, I would say that one other thing just to throw out there that I, that I think would be helpful. I think it's not going to get much better much soon. So you know, we've been talking about stagflation coming, you know, for about a year and a half and we really have this, this state of the economy that doesn't normally happen. We haven't really seen it since the 70s and you've got this high inflation at the same time that as of yesterday we had a really low GDP growth print and I believe we're in a recession and we're going to be called in a recession. It's just that we don't have two quarters of technical negative GDP because of government spending. So if you dig in the data you see the government spent a ton of to just keep it afloat. But there's a report that just came out this morning from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that I want to share with you because I think it puts things into perspective. They released this little known jobs report saying that the, the jobs were overstated in the last quarter by you know, we keep saying they keep having these negative revision prints. Surprise by over. Hold on. I want to make sure I got the amount right because I, I didn't have my coffee on my coffee yet this morning. My brain's not there. Okay. They overstated job gains by a significant amount. Rather than creating over 3 million jobs, we have a net 192,000 $192,000 people job loss over the last quarter. So that kind of shores up with the fact that we saw this very low GDP print. But the overstatement, the second quarter, 2023 new jobs were overstated by 489,000. The third quarter overstated by 832,000. And then those two together were overstated by 1.3 million jobs we already shared. I think Brian and I talked about this, that all new net jobs created in the last year were part time. The net was all part time, not full time. And when you see that historically when real full time jobs go down but more part time jobs go up to have positive job growth. It's always right before a recession. Now we have a report saying the job growth is actually negative by more than more than 1 million jobs. And so with the growth print where it is, I think we're clearly in a recession. Other than CPI is high. So the government spending that's keeping inflation high and that's true stagflation, it's really hard for the Fed to get us out of this and it's going to be a really soft economy. Banks are going to be even more nervous and pull back and I think it's going to be harder and harder. So if, you know, if people can use hard money lenders and private money lenders, you know, like you guys, that's really the only way that you're going to be able to get, you know, get development done and a lot of these deals done because the banks are nervous because the Fed cannot cut rates even with recessionary data with inflation this high because it will just spark a potentially an inflationary crisis. And that's not being dramatic, that's, that's being, you know, real, we're in a real, real pickle as an economy. So yeah, not so rosy news, but, but true.

Wow. Okay, I'm going to ask a really stupid question. If we, if we're so high in inflation like we really are, how does lowering the rates make the inflation worse? How does that work?

Okay, so generally speaking, and there's exceptions to this and there's, we have a very bifurcated economy. This is the problem. So generally speaking, when an economy starts to overheat and peak, you get a ton of inflation. So the government wants to disincentivize everybody from spending and investing. So they disincentivize it by significantly raising rates and pulling money out of the system. They basically pull money out of the system by selling treasuries and bonds and getting you to buy them. So you're putting money back into their coffers rather than putting it out into things that you spend. So when you have a recession, you typically they lower the rates drastically and they put a bunch of money into the system through the banks than say banks go lend money. So they're incentivizing you to invest and spend to reboot the economy and get it going again. Well, when you already have high inflation, if you cut rates, we're going to go woohoo. You know, and, and they do quantitative easing and get lenders to lend to you. Investors are going to Go invest more. People are going to have their, their rates fall, they're going to refinance and get the equity out of the house. They're going to go on vacations and spend, spend. So cutting rates when you have high inflation makes people go spend and it raises inflation worse. So the problem with stagflation, when you have low growth, you need to cut rates to keep you from going into a recession or a depression. But when you have high rates, you need to raise rates to keep you from getting into an inflationary crisis. So they're literally battling a two headed monster that they've let get out of control and they've got to choose which one to battle harder and that's going to, that's what's going to determine what they do with rates. I think personally, and I've been wrong on timing, timing is really difficult in these things because there's, there's a bifurcated economy too. You've got government spending and people with a lot of money. The institutions, the stock market investors, the wealthier they're still spending money and keeping that inflation high. The younger, the younger cohort, 25 to 34 and the lower income and 125,000 and below are pulling back on spending. So you've got some really spending and some really struggling. But I think the longer rates go high and the longer Treasuries are where they above 4.7, the more chance there is of a true banking crisis that would put us into a deep recession. So I think they'll fight that. When the job numbers show we're in a recession, I think they'll drastically cut rates, save the system. That's our opportunity to lock in long term debt. And then I think they're going to allow inflation and then inflation's going to get worse after the recession because it's bifurcated and those with money are going to go buy a bunch of stuff.

Well, the jobs, the job numbers show that we're in a recession. They just don't, they don't either believe what they see or, or, I mean, who, who is it?

Yeah, part of the reason for that basically the job survey that they use each quarter is its respondents to a survey and the response rates of employers that are saying where the jobs are are down significantly. I don't remember the number at the top of my head, but I think it's something like only 40% of people, you know, employers are responding to the surveys so they're not actually getting the real data. Then when they go back and they look at actual payroll data from the big payroll companies like ADP and state data. Then they get a much fuller picture and they go back and revise their estimates based on the employer surveys. I don't remember the formal term of those surveys without looking it up, but, but that's essentially what's happening. So, you know, I don't know that it's nefarious. The Fed is just bad at data collection and some of the things that they collect to make predictions have a lag to them. So all of the employment prints are revised negatively the following month or two. The same with gdp, but they just don't put out those numbers. You know, inflation is generally being revised upward and jobs and wages and GDP are being revised downward. So it gives the appearance that the economy is healthier than it is. So all these booming job reports and booming wages and everything's fine, despite inflation. That's what politicians want you to believe. Because if we really knew how many people are losing jobs, you know, everybody knows that you feel that you're living check to check, but it doesn't matter who's in office, whether it was, you know, Biden or whether it was Trump. The government wants inflation because inflation makes their debt cheaper to pay off in the future. That's why their target is 2% rather than 0%, because inflation helps. And just one other last thing, because I don't want to, I don't want to take over your, your deal today, but I, I was preparing for this webinar that I did this week and I was looking at a lot of different data and if you take this was really sobering of managers and production employees back in 1973, the year I was born, the year before I was born, the average WAGE On a 1991, they pick that as kind of the Midpoint dollar was $29 and some cents, I think 73 cents. That same exact wage in 2019 before COVID was the exact same wage. So for 39 years you think you're getting paid more, but on an inflation adjusted basis. The wage for employees for 39 years was exactly the same because of inflation, the purchasing power. So inflation keeps people thinking they're making more money, but they're still living check to check, because the cost of living is going up. So governments don't want you to realize how bad inflation is and they want you to think your wages are better than they are. And that's just the reality, no matter who's in office on both sides over a 40 year period. So in Stagflation it's just going to be worse. Our wages will not keep up while inflation is high. So you have to take control of your money doing things like investing because your wages aren't going to do it for you.

Right. Good stuff. My goodness, good stuff. Thank you both so much. I really appreciate it. Wow.

Welcome.

Okay, Major, it's your turn. Finally, y'.

All.

I met Major Hilliard at Dealmaker in Richmond, Virginia. That was where we met, wasn't it?

I believe so, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And I was taken aback by what he does. You know, he.

He.

He's a mobile home dude. He's a mobile home park fella. Now when, whenever I think of mobile home parks, I think of really high maintenance tenants that hardly ever pay. But they're cash cows. They. They seem to be cash cows. It's not. It's not sexy, but they're cash cows. And after talking with, with Major, I was just. I was so impressed at how you treat this business and what you do when you buy a business, buy a mobile home park and take it over. It just, it just amazes me what you do. I was so impressed. And I want people to hear a little bit about your story too. So I'm going to just kind of turn it over to you and let you talk about who you are and what you're doing.

Well, cool. Thanks for having me on this morning when I appreciate it. It was a pleasure meeting you and Bill as well. And I'm glad you think that way. I hope everybody thinks that way. It makes my job a little easier to find good deals. So. But yeah. So to give you a little background, I grew up. My father was a fix and flip, buy and hold residential guy. So growing up, I didn't have a babysitter. I was tearing drywall, putting down carpet, putting in seal plates. You know, you name it, I learned it and got into college. And it was 2010, 2009, where nobody was hired a commercial broker. That's what I really want to do is get a commercial brokerage. So I ended up getting a sales job anyway out of college. Couldn't get any jobs, so I was working three jobs. We had to move in with my parents. I was bouncing in three different nightclubs for security during the week, and I'm coaching the football as well as doing commercial sales. And after all that work, I only had like fifteen hundred dollars in my name. So at the time, I realized I got to do something because I flipped a few houses. But then you get, you get in that cycle where you get a large cash out, then you got to find a new deal. You got to survive till that and have enough cash. It's, it was tiring. That's tough. There's got to be a different way. So looking around and searching, I found this book called Deals and Wheels by Lonnie Scruggs and talk about how they flip manufactured homes and they sell them on finance. I said well that looks pretty good is passive cash, so let me try it. So I read that book and about a, a week later when I bought my first home in a mobile home park, I actually coerced the employee, a friend of mine in the commercial office. We put half the money up because I couldn't afford to home myself. So I learned a lot about partnerships and that sometimes most majority of the time one partner doesn't do anything. Sounds quite a learning experience too. And, but anyway, flipped that home and took the money from that and bought two more homes. Same process, bought two more. So within a four month period I went from just 1500 dollars up to my name to five homes paying 500amonth notes to me with a 2500amonth cash flow. And that allowed me to quit two of my jobs and then go to my parents house. And so that was kind of a quite an awakening experience. After my fifth home I was, I looked around, I said well you know, doing one home at a time, why don't I just do all of them at a time, all of them at once and just buy a whole park. So that was the, that was the natural progression. So I, I looked around for a few months and saved up my cash flow and had about $25,000 by the end of the year and found this pretty sweet small little park in Hampton, Virginia. And they did owner finance. They allowed me to put $25,000 in so everything I had again. But that allowed me to quit my last job because that was generating a little over $3,000 a month. So if I add that all together, I was doing pretty well. And I was officially self employed after that park. So just one tiny little park and a handful of homes. I was making enough cash flow that I was finally independent and able to run, run the show. And then we just kind of stepped stone from there. My wife got involved, my wife at the time, she got involved and I was living off of her credit cards which was great, putting everything back into the, to the business. And we actually went on a financial Friends network cruise with Walter back in six years ago and I was going to Alaska and what's interesting is that, you know, I got to talk on these cruises now with Peggy and Janice and everyone else from back then. And at that time I went on that cruise, I found the biggest deal that we had done at that time was 185 lot mobile home park in Columbia, South Carolina. And we had always wanted to move South Carolina. We like the palm trees, we heard about the beaches. But I needed a reason to do it. So I started looking for parks and I found this suite of a gym and it allowed me to go on a cruise. And we maxed up my wife's credit card. She was working a hotel at the time, supporting the business, putting every pennyweed back in, back into the business. So we said let's go all out because this is a deal. I have put everything on the line, my reputation, everything. So we're on the Cruise. I had 30 days to close. I had had it for a year trying to close it. And I have my little piece of paper brochure. I'm up there shaking like here's what I got. My name's manager. I'm sweating bullets and stuff. And sure enough I talked to a few gentlemen and with, I had two very interested investors. And 30, 30 days later we hand shook, got extension. We closed on it two months after the cruise. So just give you a perspective and how, how I love this business. What we do, we do value add parts. So that park was a very heavy value add. That part we purchased for 2.6 million. We were in it for around 3.8 and then within two years we sold it for 8.8. We made a 5 million dollar gain and a little over two years and that was, and what's beautiful about it is obviously Tom, I appreciate your presentation earlier. I'm a Christian. I found, I actually found Christ through do mobile home parks because we were able to, we get, we get value added. We get the ugliest of the ugliest. So I was dealing with gang members, drug dealers, human traffickers, you name it. And we helped get four children out of that one park. We deported 23 gang members that were known drug dealers and we helped get four children out of sex trafficking. And after like seeing and experience that firsthand and negotiating with these individuals and you know, I don't, it's not as bad anymore but we're able to see the evil of the world in such bluntness. I realized I had to be good. And that's what ended up bringing me to Christ. Because if there wasn't any good, there was no worth being here. And So I was 33 at that time too, which is ironic. So hadn't God bring me to that position and going through that darkness, allow me to see the light. And what we realized too recently is we. We sold that park and one other one and we just kept buying more and more. And we've always. My wife and I always wanted to do a farm and have a farm. So we bought a 136 acres on a mountaintop in West Virginia on a riverside which was, I mean, beautiful. Always wanted it and we did it for about a year and a half and we realized that we just. We're doing an impact. We put scripture, we preach to everyone I can, as much as I can. But I realize now looking back, we took time away and look back with Fresha what we do and with our mobile home parks by leading, by example, by being at likes and bringing a community of, of safeness. Because again, these people, no one gives them a chance. We're here to give them a second chance to provide that, prove themselves to their children and give them the life they've always wanted. And by being that example, I was able to actually preach Christ to many tenants that I would have never done before and managers who now preach Christ and give out pamphlets. So we did not realize that we're already doing God's work with what we were doing. We thought we had to go a different direction. And ironically, it took, you know, something you've always wanted and God gave it to you and realize that's not what you want. Because if it's not his will, he'll let you know. And sure enough and. But it was. It's quite an experience to look back and realize that the impact we do is not only financially for the benefit of us and our investors, but for the benefit of thousands and thousands of people and entire zip codes have cleaned up. Not only our property, all the properties surrounding it are benefited because all the trash and ugliness and darkness has left allowing whole communities to turn around overnight. And it's. It's been really rewarding. Also, we're giving it people ability to have a source of income they've never had before. We've had multiple, multiple tenants who will pay their home off very shortly because their homes are pretty or when it comes to affordable housing, you've got mobile home, a mobile home, mobile part, and on a cardboard box. There's nothing less expensive than a mobile home in any market. Even if you can try to say extended hotel stays and stuff, no way they're more than double because you cannot when you own a home and you're paying 300amonth. I challenge anybody to show me that you can have a better, better living environment for $300 a month. That just doesn't exist.

So.

So. Well, I just want to make sure people understand you're, you're buying the land and the, the homes are owned by the people there. You don't own the homes too. In some cases you do and your seller financing those to some of the people that live there. Is that correct?

Yeah. So it's, it's really based on the, the market. We're going strictly to a depending on market. If it's a very high end market, a very urban market, a major metropolitan area, we don't do rent models anymore. We used to. What we do now is we do a rent credit model where essentially instead of financing the home because we don't want to deal with licensing, you can sell or finance and the problem is with seller finance is that we've seen with this being a lower income category, some judges are a little bit more lenient on the tenant side, which I totally understand. There's a lot of crooks out there. But when you do that it seems that there's some sort of equity in the home and that the judge wants to therefore forfeit that equity back to the tenant. So basically it's a lease option and it's state by state. We've, we've been perfecting this over now 10 years in the business that each state's a little different. And so you were to either a lease option or rent to own or direct credit and the rent credit's been pretty well for us and allows them to basically have a home purchase. We get our interest calculator interest and all comes out of the monthly payment and we extend the schedule as long as we need to. That's comfortable for them. That makes sense for all parties. We're not trying to be greedy here. And that allows us to cover our basis if they don't pay. And when they do pay and they can pay off early, they then get the title for that home immediately. We just had a individual had a $26,000 remaining principal ballots or principal and interest balance and he came to us and wanted to pay it off early. He's been a good tenant. He gave us $20,000 and so we, we ate six, but we've already paid. We were already cash out on this property two years ago. So it works out for everybody. And then what happens is that when the tenants, when they own their own home, they didn't care about the community and they self start to self police. They actually reinvest and bring in better tenants. And it's amazing. It takes about 90 days to really change the mentality of a community to get them on page. And then after that when they see that we actually care because a lot of these tenants, I mean they get taken advantage of every day. No one will give them a loan to buy a house. They can't qualify for it. They're always trying to do payday loans. There's all these scams trying to hit them all the time. So when someone actually shows that they care and that they put their money where the mouth is, they really appreciate it and they are very thankful. And you can really see entire lives turned around and that's a, that's an effect that not only they will have what they will have on their children and her children's children's generational. And it's pretty, it's pretty amazing to see. I know Augie, I was talking Augie quite a bit. Auggie was shared of love. He can give a wheelchair to someone who's needed it for gosh, a long time. Very beneficial. And it's an immediate change of events for this life and for. You can see the appreciation immediately. Ours is a little bit longer, but after that it's sustainable. It's years and years and years after the fact. And it's one of the only businesses I've ever seen that people are happy to come and pay me more money and are happier by paying more because they're getting a value they've never had before and a chance that no one would give them. This has been very rewarding across the board and we fairly enjoy everything that we do about it. We enjoy going to work every day and doing new opportunities and, and on. And on top of that, sheriff's departments are with us and they call us all the time. They drop off by, we've put in the paper. Well, we do parks. We always put in a park or playground on the soccer field and we'll have the local municipality or sheriff's office come out, do a ribbon cutting ceremony. So we try to get the entire community involved and just the few parks that we have now, we haven't done so many like the big guys. But our portfolio because we bring such a heavy value increase, a heavy community turnaround that our small portfolios way outperforming the much larger ones all day long in a recession proof because we have the Best we have the best affordable housing community in any county that we go in and we're mark we're not only a market leader but we're a price leader. We try to be 10 below the competition. So we always have at least a 10 to 15% lead basis of qualified people wanting to move into the parks and they're actually fighting all the time and try to give us cash just to hold for months on end until it becomes available. That's just how, how bad they want to get in. So.

So are, are you fixing the houses up? Are you fixing them up if they need kind of work before you do the seller credit or the rent credit?

Yeah. So there's three different ways of doing. Depends on the timeline, how fast you want to turn apart. Number one, also the unit itself, the size and age of it. But essentially we have three different products. We either usually on a vacant path, we'll just throw in a brand new home. If there's an existing home already that we get a sale when we purchase the part. Depending if it's a brand new up front or if we're further down the line as far as turning the commuted around. We will either fix the home up exteriorly meaning with siding and new and new roofing and skirting and a porch. And when you do that you can put siding on any mobile home. I know a lot of people don't know that but you can put vinyl siding on any mobile home. And in fact you can we actually now there's a lot of 1980. You can tell the age of a home based on the roof. If it's a a frame, it's usually a late 80s to current. If it's a dome roof or half moon roof which is like the dome kind of roof, it's the late 70s to late 80s and anything that's flat as a 70s or prior. And so we actually put new roofs on dome roofs and turn them into a frames and then we put siding on the side when we're finished. You can't tell if it's a home from 2010 or 1990. It looks brand new. And so that increases the community look and feel immediately which increases prices which then gets you better tenants because with lights streets in a clean community, a lot of drug dealers and the lower the problem tenants are not going to come in there because they know we're not going to let things slide. So it helps to sell the house. After we have a good rapport with the community then we can sell the homes at a discount, finance it and we require the tenants because of that discount, they know they're going to discount. We then require them to put the siding and roofing on and skirting and everything up front within a 60 day period. And if they don't, then we reclaim title and start all over again. But to them they're getting a value and they're very good at what they do is a lot of contractors and blue collar workers. They, and with, with them doing it, they care, they're a little more invested than if they have just bought already done. And so the chances of turnover on that is much slimmer than if we had done ourselves. And they put a little bit extra cash down. So we, we feel that we benefit a lot. When they put the sweat equity in, they're getting a little bit of a discount on paper but it saves us the time and energy and now they're invested in the community and not just a pass through tenant with strong cash.

That's awesome. That's awesome. I just love the way you're building community within the community.

It's.

You know, when they, it really does take a village these days, you know, to, to work together to keep your kids straight. And you know, I, I, I remember, you know, if, if we misbehaved in any way and our neighbors saw that, you know, either they'd say something direct to us or my mother would know in no time flat. And you don't see that kind of thing happening anymore. I, I would imagine in the communities that you're helping to create here, you're, you're seeing people really be there for each other.

That's right. Yeah. And our, any contractor that goes out, they'll, they'll bring them sweet tea and lemonade, they'll bring them lunch to keep them working. I mean they really care. And if you're lucky enough to grow up like I did in the, in the 90s or earlier you had the cul de sacs where everybody was on their bikes and outside. Well we have that because essentially a bubble hill parks is a humongous cul de sac. It's got one or two inlets and it's all around and so everybody knows each other. So the kids are always outside park playing the way it should be and which is great. And they have the parents house community so everyone looks out for each other's child. It's a really, it's a really good scenario. When it's all finished, yeah, we, you really see a big turnaround and what's cool is we can pull in And. And usually the owner's fear. People run away. I did Section 8 for a long time. They can hear my truck from a mile away, half a mile away, because I had to cut it off my straight pipe exhaust on my diesel truck, which I like because I didn't want to deal with them. So I prefer them to run away. But now, now when I come in, I'm the ice cream man. They all come banging on the door. I want to say hi and see how we're doing and show us. Show us a new thing they did to their home. And the flowers they plant. I mean, they really. They really care. And it's great that we can go anywhere and be. And be welcome.

That's really awesome. That's really awesome. So. So do you teach people how to do this or mentor people, coach people how to do this?

Yeah. So we just. We're trying this out in May. This is the first time we're doing it. The first cruise we were Deal maker actually got me on the idea for Share to Love. And we've been trying to do this space and we wanted to make sure. I didn't want to give out any information that I didn't do myself. So I have to do it 10 times. So we've done well over that with parks to make sure our model works really well. And what's interesting is that growing up and starting out, there's only a few limited resources. Only like one or two books that I could find on the subject. There's a few. There's one or two mobile home boot camps that you can go to. The problem is, is that they're run by these large corporations that just throw money at it and they have investors and they have a bankroll or someone like me who didn't have any cash. You got to be creative. And so I took the same strategies, most of the same strategy to learn from flipping houses to the commercial realm without knowing that I could do that and everything's negotiable.

But.

Yeah, so we're doing a. An event that we have you guys fly into Columbia, South Carolina, where we have a few different parks and different stages and you can do a ride around for a day. I can take you into a community. I can show you the hub. And then. And then the morning, while it's cool. And in the afternoon, when it's hotter, we go into a conference room and I lay everything out. We go from acquisition to evaluation to management, to financing to sales, and then everything in between and how you can roll it into another Project. So we're. We are in the early stages and we're setting that up. We love for people to come and they can buy a seat in a truck. I can pick you up from the airport, drive you around, and you learn from soup to nuts, everything. And it's. And it's based off of a anybody can do it kind of model where literally. And I can go many stories here. My second park I bought, the way it's structured out is that at closing, I actually got a $20,000 check. At closing, I didn't bring any money to the table. Wow. Many different ways to do it. I've been through the trenches. And so I want to be able to give that knowledge back because it's a twofold and hopes that people will want to JV with us and learn and then helps with that is that even if they don't, they can now give a better taste to the stereotype of mobile home parks, which is a huge need.

Right.

All we have is this negative stereotype, which is actually becoming less and less common. As now people are saying, well, wait a minute. You know, I can go buy majors home for $80,000 in the same market that a regular shot. The same size house was $300,000.

Right.

So this. This stereotypes are vastly changing because of this high inflationary market. And by having more investors pull in is it gives the ability to have more development and a lot of park developments going on in the Midwest. I like to see that the east and Southeast, where there's an even bigger need. And it's coming. It's just to take some time.

Awesome. So. So Columbia is about an hour from me.

Yeah.

You remember you said you'd call me when you get to Columbia next?

Yeah, I'll be there. Come on up. I'll call you. We get off. Yeah, but we. We'll rent a car.

When's the event. When's the event that you have coming up? I've got people asking.

I've got. It's in May, so I have. It's a limit. It's a limited basis because I rent a car and I can't drive with so many people and an expedition or something like that. So we have this filled. But what I can do is, Wendy, I can get with you after the call and get you a date because a lot of people paid good money for these seats to donate chairs. And I would extend the same welcome if they want to make the same contribution to share the love.

Awesome.

We were able to raise $10,000 at DealMaker for, for a van full of people, which is a little over, I think 200 shares or something like that.

And that's, that's pretty cool.

That's pretty cool.

I've got your phone number. What's, what's, what's another way they can get in touch with it? I've got your phone number on here.

Sure, yeah, yeah. The easier and better way is our email address if you want to send it to Major M A J O R at M as in Mary, H as in Henry Estates. It's E S T A t e s llc.com and you're welcome, everyone's welcome to go check out our website. MH Estates LLC.com. you can kind of see our communities, what our homes are, and just get an overall feel for what we do. And again, our, and I didn't say this earlier, but our logo, our slogan, our motto, that been since day one, is creating cash flow communities. We create cash flow by building a community. And cash flow is just a benefactor of, it's not the main course. The main course is create the community. And by doing that, we are rewarded handsomely or for ourselves and our investors.

Awesome. Does, does anybody have any questions? If you do, you can either raise your hand or unmute yourself because we've got just a couple of minutes to do that if you have any questions. This has been awesome. I, I, it's, I, you know, I'm, I'm re impressed again. Hold on, I got, I got a question going on. Go ahead. I, I. Poo Poo boy, you gotta mute yourself.

Go ahead.

Poo boy. Who, who are you? You disappeared. Okay, maybe we lost them. I think we must have lost them. Sorry about that, Tony. Go ahead.

Yeah.

So Major, appreciate everything, him sharing, everything for sharing. So we, we have a mobile home park of our own that we're developing and I was curious as to have you worked with some banks in order to finance the homes? And obviously you keep a lot.

Right?

But I was curious as to have you had any experience with that, you know, keeping the land, finance, living a bank, financing the home to the, to the buyer.

Yeah, so we do that a lot. We, A lot of our value add is in vacant lots. So what we do is we'll have investors or we'll bankroll ourselves and we'll do tranches of homes. So we just finished a community that's 125 pads. When we bought it, it had 39. So we put a little over 80 homes into that community in three years. And so we buy in tranches of either six or 10. And you got to have enough bankroll to do it because if you finance it, it doesn't work because it's, they charge you 912 interest. And so we do is I'll have an investor put it in for eight and we'll buy a trot and then we'll sell those six homes and then we'll reorder another six. And because each time you sell it, you get paid back. You reimburse what you bought the home for plus an additional 10 on top which pays your investor so you don't have to come out of pocket. And you're really just bunny hopping. You just hop, hop, hop until you finish project. A lot of guys will buy all the homes at once, which is a huge mistake because you're paying interest on inventory that's just sitting there. So buying it smaller batches, not only do you get more of a discount from the manufacturer because the salesman is going to do everything he can to keep you because he knows he's got all these units rolled off the line, but it allows you to keep your funds and your interest payments low. And what we do is we'll have one of the large three mortgagers in the country that will finance the home to the tenant. We're reimbursed and we go buy another unit because all we care about at that time is lot rent. So I would recommend getting you small batches and then sell it to your tenant with one of the larger companies like 21st Mortgage. Get reimbursed and go buy another unit because your main goal is to fill those lots to get those lot rents.

Okay, so that's 21st century mortgage. Vanderbilt does that. Who else does it?

Zippy. And you got Triad.

The reason I was asking, we're working with both Zippy and Triad.

Kimberly Gregory. I, I, we can't hear them. Okay, go, go ahead. What were you going to say, Tony?

I'm sorry, I'm saying I was telling Major that we also work with Triad and Zippy as well or we're doing these, these programs. Triad has been more flexible with lending for buyers because, because that's the thing Zippy is pretty much fixed on, on their, their terms. But Triad has multiple lending programs to where they can land with somebody that maybe doesn't have a, a great credit score but it's still a good tenant. So it's more, it's more flexible. That's what we, we've experienced on our end.

Yeah. Tries we get. You can always go local too if you're lucky to have a regional, but yeah, those are the three big ones. And we're, we're in the, in the mix creating our own mortgage company to go national. But we're about two years out from that because we see that's a huge, huge shortage of finance or mobile homes. And we're financing our own homes in our own parks. We might as well just go ahead and create another mortgage company versus paying a 5% spread to everybody else.

Yeah, I love, I love that you're doing that. Lewis from Texas, go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. I'm actually in Angels Camp, California at the moment.

Oh, wow.

My question is, how do you find the mobile home parks?

Early on when you were first starting.

What were the biggest challenges that you.

Had that you had to learn from and maybe systemize? And do you know anything about the Texas market or what markets would you. Could you give a little bit more information about?

Sure, yeah. So your first question is how to find parts, especially earlier on, early on, again, there's not much education out there. So what I realized is that there's no education and the people who listen to them either have to be a specialized broker or they don't know what they're doing. So some of the best deals I found, especially early on were realtors. Realtors who are a wife or uncle, cousin, friend, son, whoever who's listening doesn't know what the heck they're doing. You can actually get a really good deals. So they do go into mls, but you have to look because they don't know how to designate it. So I recommend everybody check your mls. You can look off market. The problem is, is that they're very hard to find. When you go to look for a mobile home park, you go to the gis, there's no zoning stadium, mobile home park. It's either in an R5, it's in a high industrial complex, it's in office retail. It's across the board because it's such a unique zoning. So literally the only way these brokers are finding them is using a Google map and searching every square inch of the country, looking through trees to find these parts, and then reverting back to the gis to find a parcel. And they have teams and teams of people doing it. So. So I would recommend if you're able to check out and keep an eye on your local MLs and then any, you know, drive by is a good shot. But I realized that with these owners being older and haven't owned them for a long time, it's usually a first come first serve when they throw their hands up Just like residential when they throw their hands up or when the children get it from a probate it's the first person they see to sell it. But there are we currently use resources journey for relationship through the years are personal or mobile home park brokers that specifically sell and list mobile home parks. They do way way more cold calling and marketing for parks than you and I ever will do because that's their livelihood. And so when you get a good relationship with them they feed you. And so I get a ton of off market deals every day because they know I can close. I'm one of the only guys that they know when they bring me a deal I have a 90 chance of closing because we do our homework. So that was your first question and your second question was markets. So there's a few things that look into I'm a buy and hold. I want to hold my stuff forever until I get a stupid price and then I sell it. So but we always go in a buy and hold strategy. So yes, we really like East Texas. We like Texas a lot. From Dallas east we like San Antonio a lot. Then we're in the southeast. We're in the Virginia, Carolinas, East Tennessee, northeast Georgia, Florida, red states and landlord friendly states we really like a lot. And I really. And the other thing is is the east and southeast is because in the Midwest and west there's a lot of water issues because the aqua fires and the water basins are being dried up. And that's a concern for me. So I'd rather just stick to where I know we're going to be always good and in my backyard. And it's just we know the market really, really well. We know the east coast really well. I live there. But Texas is a very very park friendly state. In fact majority of new park development is in Texas, Oklahoma and Arizona. But I would not touch Arizona because of water issues. East Texas is always very good near the Gulf Coast.

The other question was at when you first started off, you know by yourself or whatever it was, what were your biggest challenges?

Oh, money. I never had money. So. So you got to be creative. You got to give sometimes I I bought over market. I would buy above ask if the seller was willing to finance because no one will finance. You're going to have to sometimes when you start off you have to go a little bit higher on your rates. You're gonna have to go cmbs in fact my, my first large park that actually got financed on I was Getting I had a rate of nine and a half percent. The CMBS with a hard money for two years versus everybody else at the time was getting 5%. But you got to pay to play if you want to get in the game, you got to give up a little bit. So I had to. But we, and for a fact. So we bought that park for. We're in it for 1, 3 and then four years later I sold it for 3.3. So we made 2 million on it, but I was paying 9%. But had you been a little greedy and not want to pay an extra interest to the bank to even get you in the property, it would have lost that on the deal.

Yeah.

So you got to get especially early on, especially as winning as a hard money. You got to give up a little bit more up front until you're established and then you get those better roles. But if you think it'll come in brand new and get the rates and terms I'm getting, it's just not going to happen.

Awesome. So. So you mentioned too real quick and I promise this is the last thing because I know a lot of people have to go. You, you JV joint venture with people and you might be looking for investors as well. Is that true?

Yeah, we do JV for sure. And we always do referral fees in case it doesn't work out. But yeah, we, we love people to bring us parts. We don't really touch anything under 50 pads, just the economies of scale. So 50 pads minimum. And the uglier the better. These sellers that I buy from, I'm usually the last chance they got to sell. They're stuck in the corner because either the park's not financible or they're not able to list it because of some other. Because if they do, it's going to cause more issue with the tenants. And so we kind of get a really good niche that we are, we're the janitors, we come clean up. We are the last stuff they got. And so everybody else is going after the easy fruit. We go for the little bit harder stuff. But that's where you get your real big value is those big turnarounds.

Awesome. And if somebody has money in their self directed IRA and they just want to invest in you and let you do it, do you do that as well?

Yeah. So for people like that, 100% we have two different products. We have our parks which we acquire which is a much harder and heavier bankroll but with the even better and more unique item that we have is our Dealership. Our dealership. Currently we have 67 homes that are all paid off and financed in house to our tenants that are in our communities. So what we do is we purchase parks that have high vacancy with empty pads. We then fill those pads with, with homes that we then finance ourselves all in house in our own community. So we control everything about it, but we're able to get interest on those notes. So in the home only costs $60,000. So if someone wants to get into the park game and doesn't, and doesn't want to take a lot of risk, you can put in 60,000. That's a minimum requirement on that. It covers one home. And the collateral are the other 67 homes on our inventory. So your risk is not mitigated to one. It's mitigated to our entire portfolio which is currently 67 and rising daily. So you can feel a little more comfort that your risk is super spread. You're getting a guaranteed return as well as you're able to sit in the passenger seat and see what we do in our communities and understand right up front for a very low buy in and at the same time get the interest.

That's awesome. That's beautiful. Thank you so much. Wow, this has been great. I've put your email address in here twice, I put your phone number in here twice. And I'm sure you're going to hear from a lot of people. You're definitely going to hear from me. So I really appreciate it. And, and you know, just kudos to you for how you're changing people's lives. I just, it's, it's amazing what you've been able to do and what's really cool is how, how you came to Christ because of what you're doing and now your, your work is your ministry. It's so awesome. We all love to see that. So thank, thank you so much for sharing what you've shared. This has been awesome. Brian, thank you for, for everything you do every week. We really appreciate it. Anna, thank you for your incredible intelligence too. And Tom, the man with the plan, are you ready to, to close us in prayer?

I, I am. Hey, just remember, guys, stay on the altar. Don't, don't crawl off, don't crawl down. Let's pray. Gracious Father. Father, just, just give us the strength and the wisdom and the desire, Father, to, to glorify you. Because glory to you, Father, means that others will see your work, Father, and, and come toward you. And, and we give us an opportunity to share the good news, Father. Give us that strength to share your news with those that we come in contact with. We honor you, Father. We praise you through your son, Jesus our Lord Christ. Amen.

Amen. Tom, you know, you.

We.

We wouldn't be here without you. Thank you, Tom.

Thank you.

So next week, we. I believe we have Dave Richter next week. If you haven't read his book, profits first for real estate. You need to get it. It's really, really good. And he's come out with some new things, too, so we're going to have him next week. I'm looking forward to having him here. Major, thank you again. That was really awesome. Y' all have an incredible, wonderful week, and we'll see you next Friday. Oh, by the way, I'll be in the Bahamas next week, so it's. It's not a fun trip. It really is for work, and I thank God for these kinds of work trips, but I'll see you from the Bahamas. I'll see you later. Bye, y'.

All.

All right. Thanks for the opportunity.

Bye.