The Real Estate Strategy That Turned $20 into $2 Million

If you think getting a 16% return from something that's currently returning only 6% is impossible, that it defies the laws of physics or nature, then I think it's time to expand your mind a bit. Because when we say it's the best, I don't mean that it's a little bit better than other investments or even a lot better. I mean it's orders of magnitude better, hundreds of times better. We spent the $20 on a bucket of white paint and a brush. Now, to explain how we turn that into $2 million, I'm going to have to set the scenario.

If you're not already sold on just how incredible real est be, now we're going to do it. This is exciting. Welcome, everybody, to another episode of the Main Street Business podcast interview series where I get an opportunity to interview an influencer making a difference in our lives in Main Street America. So I'm glad to welcome Dolph Deroos, PhD, a globally recognized real estate investor and author mentor renowned for multimillion dollar deals, real estate ventures. He mentors real estate agents, national leaders worldwide, has written and published 11 bestselling property books. That's seven more than including the New York Times bestseller Real Estate Riches, which we have on the counter here today.

And welcome, Mark. Thank you so much. It's my absolute pleasure to be here and thank you for all the accolades.

Well, it's exciting that you're here in person. Truth be told, everybody, we were trying to coordinate a remote interview twice, and then all of a sudden we found out, holy heck, we live 20 minutes away from each other. Get over here. So it's just been a wonderful opportunity to meet. Now, today's topic is about obviously real estate. And what we want to unpack is, first of all, the mindset of creativity. Dolph has taught on this for years and he has some important insights on how we need to cultivate that mindset. As a Realtor, with some fun examples, I love the topic myself. I think creativity, creativity is absolutely critical. And then his four attributes, I'm going to get to guess what these four are. These four attributes that make real estate the best performing investment compared to all others. And so that's our topics today. I know it's going to impact all of you in an important way. I'm excited.

I'm excited too, Mark. And just to be clear, when we say it's the best, I don't mean that it's a little bit better than other investments or even a lot better. I mean it's Orders of magnitude better, hundreds of times better. And I hope to prove the case today with you.

Okay. I'm your judge and jury here. As a lawyer, I think I can make that call.

Okay, I'm up for it.

All right now with creativity, let me just pose the question in this manner. I feel so many real estate investors get tunnel vision. They go into a deal and it's, this is the way we're going to make the deal happen. And if it deviates at all, it turns has to turn from a fix and flip to a rental, or just this basic example, or the development has to get kind of minimized. Who knows any sort of deviation, they may call it a failure or it's a crisis or it's a disaster. And all because they could have been more creative from the outset and maybe even seen a better, with better creative approach. That's just given my life experience. You have so much more on this. First, your perspective on the importance of creativity for real estate investors.

It is crucial, Mark, for the following reason. Most people, when they look at any deal, be it real estate or they're buying a secondhand car or whatever, they look at what I call the snapshot of how things are right now in this moment. So they'll see a house, it's run down, it's got a horrible garden, it doesn't have a garage, it doesn't have a carport. And they think, well, this property is not very good. It's only going to return me 6%. But that's better than the last one I saw, which was only 5.5%. I think I'll buy it. And they hope to get that 6% return on it. What I encourage people to do and what I train them to do is not to see a snapshot of how things are right now, but to get a video or a movie going forward into the future. In other words, what could we do with this property to make the returns 8 or 10 or 16%. And if you think getting a 16% return from something that's currently returning only 6% is impossible, that it defies the laws of physics or nature, then I think it's time to expand your mind a bit. Because something I've learned, Mike, that's very interesting, if you have a belief and you passionately believe in that belief, you will find evidence to support your theory that that belief is true, right? So you'll get stuck in it. And that's why people who believe that there are no good deals out there, they won't find any. And they'll think that their belief that there are no good deals out there is validated. Whereas mavericks like you and I who know there are great deals out there. In fact, one of my signature sayings is that the deal of the decade comes along about once a week. If you believe that, you'll find them. But if you believe that, by definition, I'm using the word decade, the deal of the decade comes along, by definition, once every 10 years. And you hear that Mark or I found a good deal last week, you'll say, well, that's this decade's deal gone. We may as well give up looking for the next 10 years. And you'll find evidence to support that. You're not looking. You won't find them. So we've got to create our own deals.

I love it. So first point, 16% is better than 6%.

Absolutely.

So far. Check. You're doing okay.

Okay.

Now, on that creativity, I know that you've spoke about this a lot too, is that when we look at a property, and I think you have A list of 101 things that people just need to think outside the box, and that's just another fundamental creative approach.

Well, I kept on saying that there are 101 things you can do to a property to massively increase its value, and people would come back as well, maybe two or three, but not 101. So I'm always one to put my money where my mouth is. I sat down and wrote a book called literally 101 ways to massively increase the value of your real estate, which is without spending much money. I think it's the longest title on Amazon. And here's a question I have for you, Mike. Do you think it was easy or difficult to come up with 101 Ways?

Well, I would say, on the face of it, it would be hard. I could probably dig up 30, you know, while we're sitting here, maybe.

It was extraordinarily difficult.

Okay, good.

So it was difficult to limit it to 100 rand. No, seriously, because there are so many more. And when I read my own book now, I think, well, gosh, some of these ideas are a bit dated, but there are new ones every day. We've new technology that opens up new possibilities of what you can do to massively increase the value. And I know some people might be thinking, well, don't just talk about them. Give us an example.

You know what I love is your example of a light bulb. I remember you telling that story somewhere.

That's the cheapest one I've got. The cheapest idea of how to massively increase the value of a house is to take the light bulb in a room. Let's say it's a 40 watt light bulb and I'm talking incandescent watts. Nowadays everyone's got LED lights, right? But they always have the incandescent equivalent or whatever. So if you've got the equivalent of a 40 watt light bulb, that means the room is going to be a little bit d. Very well lit. So it's going to look dark and dingy and not very big and not very bright. If you take out that 40 watt light bulb and replace it with 150 watt bulb or the equivalent of that, then suddenly the room's going to look bigger, brighter, cleaner and fresher, and it will rent faster and it will rent for a slightly higher value and it will sell faster. If you're silly enough to sell it. We can talk about why selling is silly a bit later on. And the great thing about this idea, especially if you're really cheap, is that that 40 bulb light that you took out, the 40 watt bulb light, it still works. You can still use it somewhere else. Right, but that's a minor point, but that's the cheapest idea. The most expensive one we've got in this book is how we turn $20 into 2 million overnight. And from experience, Mark, when people first hear this, they say, well, you had us up till now, but now you've lost us. That is just impossible. And again, if your belief is that that's impossible, you won't even listen to a potential explanation if you want me to share it, of how that was done and you'll say, no, it's impossible. He must have been telling a big fiber.

Well, you've got to share it now. And I know you're saving some. I'm going to plant the seed. Now, I know you've got an event on the 15th. Is it 14th or 15th?

14th of March.

14th of March coming up. So many of you that are catching this before that date, you've got to take note because I know you're going to have some reveals at that event, but you'll reveal this one now. $22 Million?

Yeah, 20 to 2 million. And get the slate clean from the start. We spent the $20 on a bucket of white paint and a brush. Now, to explain how we turn that into $2 million, I'm going to have to set the scenario. Firstly, it happened in Jakarta. Jakarta is the capital city of Indonesia, the most populous nation in the southern hemisphere. The most populous Muslim country in the world. It is also known Jakarta, as being the most congested city on this planet.

And can I say, it is the coolest named city in the world, isn't it?

Jakarta. Jakarta. It just sounds amazing.

Denver. That's not fun.

Jakarta. Yeah. Jakarta. Yeah. No, I love it there. I love it there, actually. And so you measure how far it is to get somewhere, not in terms of kilometers or if you're still in imperial units and miles, but in terms of hours. How many hours does it get to take to get to your destination? So you mentioned before it took 20 minutes to get here. I think that's by bicycle. By car, it's about five minutes. So we're really close to each other, but we always measure it in terms of miles. Here, right there, it's hours. So if you have to go to a meeting and it's three hours away, you've got to put that into your schedule. So we had a client with a commercial building in the cbd, the central business district of Jakarta. And the drive to the airport, Sukai no Hata International airport should be 45 minutes with no traffic. But because of the congestion and the traffic, it could take four hours, it could take six hours. That means that a director of a company in this building, if he's got a 9am board meeting, he or his assistant cannot book a 2pm flight because he may not make it. So what did we do with this bucket of white paint? I went onto the roof of this building. It had a flat concrete roof, conveniently, and I painted a big white circle on this roof and then the letter H in the middle, and we turned it into a helipad. Now, full disclosure, you need to get Civil Aviation Authority, which is the Indonesian equivalent of the faa, approval for this, and you need to get, you know, letters of consent from other people and promises of helicopter rides and all that sort of thing. But we got all of that. And now the ride to the airport was 15 minutes. And about half of the tenants knew that they'd probably avail themselves of this, so they thought the increase in rent was worthwhile. The other half who admitted that they'd probably never use it, they still didn't mind the increase in rent because they had bragging rights. Oh, you know, our building has a heliport. We can get to anywhere in 15 minutes. So the rental, when you convert it from Indonesian rupiah per square meter to US dollars per foot, was about $14 a foot. And with the helipad, it went to $16 a foot. So a two dollar per year increase in rent times 100,000 square feet. The area of the. We got a $200,000 lift in rent on that building, which had a cap rate of 10%. You divide the rent by the cap, it went up by 2 million. Bingo. Not quite overnight, but almost. And the thing about it, Mike, coming back to what you said about creativity, the interesting thing, it wasn't the kind of paint we used or how white the white. The creativity of coming up with the idea. Now, can you apply this to every building on this planet? Of course not. Those 101 ideas I talk about, maybe in your building or in your house, you can only deploy 11 of them. But I tell you what, deploying those 11 ideas might be all you need to go from 6% to 16%.

You know what I'm going to do in my rental? I think this weekend I'm going to put in a drone pad. You know, just a drone could land there. You know, it could work. I love it. That is so awesome. What a neat story. I just love it. And again, the fact you could say Jakarta about 10 times is even cooler because it is the coolest word. All right, now that leads into. If you're not already sold on just how incredible real estate can be. Now we're going to do it. This is exciting. So the four attributes that you've spoken all over the world, globally on, these four attributes that make real estate better than any other type of investment. I want to guess the first one, if I could. Okay, can I guess?

Sure.

Cash flow.

I love the fact that real estate is cash flow. Without cash flow, I wouldn't be interested in investing in real estate. But that is not even any one of the.

I thought you were going to say, bless your heart, Mark, but okay, so what's number one?

So I'm going to talk about making an investment of an amount of money. It doesn't matter how much. It could be $10, it could be 10 million. But for ease of conversation, let's talk about 100,000 cash. Let's imagine you've got 100,000 cash, and you want to deploy that in both real estate or in the alternative, which I'll generically group together as paper products. I'm talking about the stock market. Maybe it's futures, which is a derivative of the stock market, or options, which is another derivative, or certificates of deposit or treasury bills or anything. I call them paper products. Let's say you've got $100,000 cash. Here's question number one, with $100,000 cash back. How many dollars worth of stock can you buy? Not a tough question.

$100 of worth of stock?

Yeah, exactly. Well, 100,000. Yes, you're right.

We were at 100,000.

That and see, I even got it wrong. No, no, but your mind was in the right place and our words just sometimes don't catch up. I have that a lot. So I know some people say, well, hang on a minute. I know someone who buys stock on margin. Well, that's available to a very few select people who are very rich. And if ever the share value or stock value goes down, they do what's called a margin call. For most investors to have $100,000 stock portfolio, they need $100,000 cash. Nothing right or wrong about that. Now let's imagine we have the same hundred thousand dollars and we want to invest in real estate. Could we buy a property worth 100,000? The answer is yes. But we could also buy a property worth 200,000 with a 50% mortgage or a property with 300,000 with a 67% mortgage. Or you can buy a half million dollar property with a $400,000 mortgage. We're at an 80% mortgage. That's the limit banks will go to without requiring PMI insurance. They will go higher if you're willing to pay pmi. Right, Personal mortgage. So we could buy a million dollar property with a $900,000 mortgage and 100,000 cash. In case you think that's ridiculous, in the Netherlands in the 1970s they were offering mortgages of 125%. Here in the States, the highest mortgage rate we've ever offered is 120%. You might say, why on earth would a bank offer more than it costs? Well, the idea is that when you buy a house, it's not suitable for you to live and you want to make a few modifications. Remodel the kitchen so they give you extra money to make the remodel. They know they'll be covered because the equity will go up. So a 90% mortgage is easy. So now we've got a million dollar property with that same 100,000 cash. What are the implications of that? Imagine everything goes up by 10%. Your stock will have gone from 100,000 to 110. You've made 10%. Your property will have gone from 1 million to 1.1 million. You've made 100,000 profit or 100% on your equity. Now some smart people will say, well, that's all good and well, Dolph, but what if everything goes Down? Well, if your stock goes down by 10%, it goes from 100 to 90. You've lost 10,000 and your property will go from 1 million to 900,000. You've wiped out your equity. If you haven't lost your investment, you can hang on to it. It's still generating rental income enough to cover the mortgage. And over time, history up till now has shown that real estate doesn't go up linearly and what the mathematicians would call monotonically. It goes up in fits and starts. And in general, every peak is higher than every previous. A previous peak. And every trough is higher than every previous trough. So if you hang on long enough, it will. I'm not worried about it going down. So you've got leverage. You can buy more dollars worth of real estate that is going up in the market than you can anything else. Leverage, Leverage.

Love it. Leverage.

And banks advertise all over the world on all kinds of advertising media. Thinking of buying a house? Come and see us. We'll lend you the money. This week only we've got no application fee this week only we've reduced this or whatever.

No. And I love it when you learn the real value and the power of calculating your ROI or cap rates, all the different terminology used, and you take what you really invested and that power of leverage, it just exponentially can increase that rate of return.

An interesting little side fact, Mike, you mentioned before, I did a PhD in electrical engineering. That's not the easiest topic around. That was eight years of hard slog, 11 hours a day, seven days a week, and yet everything I learned at engineering school has been made redundant by new technology. You think about it. Whereas everything you would have learned about real estate. And there are only about 12 words you need to know. You need to know the difference between collateral and equity. And if you don't know the difference, you're at a disadvantage to those investors who do. But once you've learned those 12 words and that's all there is, there's nothing more to learn. And it doesn't change with time. It doesn't get replaced with new technology. It's so easy. But people are more interested in watching a soap on TV than in reading a good book on real estate.

I love it. Okay, number two.

Yes.

Tax strategies. Come on, work with me here.

They are. Terrific advantages. Like you can get depreciation on real estate.

Yes.

Like you depreciate a car or a computer because it really does go down in value. You can depreciate real estate on the basis that it's going. But the government's not so silly to think that it goes down. They know it. Why do they let you depreciate real estate even though it goes up? Because they know they're not good at providing accommodation for the needy. So they give us an incentive to do it. But that's not one of the four.

Okay, number two then is.

Number two is. Let's assume you've bought your $100,000 worth of stock. The question now becomes the day you buy it, what is that portfolio worth?

The same you pay for it, of

course, because it's regulated by computers. Right? We pay the same price for a share of Hewlett Packard or whatever it. Whether you're in Helsinki or Sydney, Australia or Tahiti. So there's one price for it all over the world. And when you spend your 100,000, the moment you acquire it, it's worth 100,000. Okay, let's compare that with that real estate. We said we bought a property for a contract price of a million dollars using 100,000 cash and a $900,000 mortgage. The day you buy that property, what is it worth?

A million?

No, it could well be worth a million dollars. But is it not possible, Mark, that some fast talking agent or seller talked you into buying a proper million dollars? It was only worth 750,000 and you bought a lemon. You paid too much for it.

That's happened to me.

It happens every day of the week. Not to you, hopefully, but it happens to someone every day of the week. But by the same token, is it not possible that that property that you just contracted to buy for a million dollars is worth one and a half million dollars and you just bought a bargain? Of course it is. That happens every day of the week too. That's why you need to be wide awake in this game to make sure you buy the ones worth 1.5 million, not 3/4? And you might say, why would anyone in his or her right mind sell a property worth 1.5 million for a mere $1 million? Oh, it's a good question.

God's good reason.

Again, 101 reason. Divorce situated. Let's just sell this stupid property quickly and be done with each other. Or they don't know the value. They were bequeathed it. Four kids got it. You know, one wants to keep it and rent it out, one wants to sell it, one wants to live in it. And the fourth sibling is hiking in Nepal and they can't reach him. And the lawyer representing him says, listen, let's just sell the damn thing quickly. So they engage a real estate agen rookie. They didn't know he was a rookie and the rookie doesn't know what it's worth. He's just started this game and he thinks, well, let's make a quick sell. Let's put it on the market for a million and see how we go. And it sells within two days because you bought it. And little did they know it was worth 1.5. So you can buy way below true value. I would put it in writing that every property I bought has been bought at below market value. Now I have to look at an awful lot of properties to do that, but that's another story how you look at a lot of properties.

I love it. I love it. Okay, hidden value. Can I call it that?

Number two, hidden value you can buy for. Yes. It's worth more than the purchase price. Yeah, hidden value.

I like building value. Hidden value. Okay, because you found it because you're smart. Okay. Number three.

Yes.

Okay, I'm not doing too well. I'm going to try passive income. Why are you laughing? That's a good one.

It is a great one. But you also get passive income from options and treasury bills and all that sort of thing. So we've touched on number three before because here's the question. When you buy your $100,000 worth of stock, and it's worth, as we've agreed, exactly $100,000amoment, you buy it. What can you personally do to increase its value? Person?

Well, I could, if I buy Walmart stock, I could shop at Walmart.

That's right. I'll give you a few more ideas. You can write letters of encouragement to the directors of those companies, hoping that they'll have a good day and therefore perform better in you. You can hope, you can pray. There's a lot you can do, but in essence there's little you can do that will materially affect the price. Now, let's imagine we've bought this property for a contracted price of $1 million, but it's actually worth one and a half million. What can we do to that property to increase its value even further is what you're saying? Yes. Okay.

Change the light bulbs.

Change the light bulbs. Give me one.

At the other extreme, make a helipad.

Put a helipad on the roof. That's right. And you can use any of the 99.

Okay, I do have a good one because I've learned this one before too, is you want to reduce the operating costs, like maybe reaching out to the garbage company. And could we reduce the cost of landscaping services? Could we reduce the cost of maintenance in some way? Because if I can reduce those costs, then I increase the margin. The profit.

Yes.

Which increases my roi and with my cap rate, the value. I guess so. I guess the answer is I could reduce costs.

Yes. At number four.

Well, no, we're on number three, right? We're number three. We're adding value.

Yeah, you can add value. So you might reduce costs by having inefficient cooling systems. You might have swamp coolers, for instance, and you replace them with air conditioning systems. Reverse cycle paint. Oh, absolutely. There's a new paint they just came out with at Purdue University. It's a very thin coating, but they say it's the equivalent of adding a 10 kilowatt AC plant to a building. Because. Yes, it reflects nearly all the UV light coming in. So no heat gets in, but it's transparent to infrared light on the inside. It just goes straight out. I can't wait for this technology to become an engineer.

You'd notice that.

Well, but I think most people should. I mean, there are so many things we can do. Say, yes, I'm going to paint all my buildings with that.

So number three is you can actually increase the value of your investment where I can't. If it's paper.

Correct. You can personally do things. Some might cost a lot, but they give a huge benefit. Some cost a little like a light bulb change.

Wow. I love it. Okay, number four.

Oh, I give up.

You know, I don't want to embarrass myself in bat zero.

No, it's all good fun. And, Jess, number four, I think, is the most exciting one. And it's an eye opener. And when people hear this, they're gonna kick themselves. Don't kick too hard. Here it goes. You've bought your $100,000 worth of stuff. It's worth $100,000 when you bought it, and there was nothing you could do during your ownership time to increase its value. But let's say through sheer luck or market forces or whatever, it's doubled in value from 100 to 200,000. What must you now do to get some of the benefit of this increase in value?

This leans on taxes. I can feel it coming.

Absolutely.

That was one of mine. Well, but it wasn't number. Oh, you thought it was number two. Okay, so what could I do? So I have. Have. So I have paper that's doubled in value.

Yes. Sell it, I guess you sell it.

Yeah.

That's the option you've got. And when you sell, you pay capital gains tax, right. And you pay commissions to the brokers who do the selling and all that sort of thing. So let's compare that with our real estate. We use the same hundred thousand cash to buy a property for a million dollars. Right? So when it doubles, it goes from 1 million to 2 million. Right? Okay. No, that's wrong. I tricked you. You see, because we paid a million for it, but it was worth one and a half million already. We bought a bag. So when it doubles in value, it goes from one and a half to three million.

Gosh, you're probably pretty good at parties.

No, spoil them. So it's worth 3 million. Same question. What must we do with this property to get some of the to benefit from that increase in value?

Now I see it.

You know where I'm headed now?

Yeah. I can borrow.

You do not have to sell, you just refinance. Let's say we go to the bank and say, Mr. Bank Manager, remember when I told you that when I bought this property I thought it was worth one and a half million and you said, no, we are conservative banks, we're going to take the lesser of the purchase price or the appraisal. And the purchase price was 1 million. So we're just appraising it at 1 million.

And we're only going to give you 900 grand.

Right. So, well, you give me. Well now I've got an appraisal from your bank approved appraiser appraising this building at 3 million. Will you please give me another 90% mortgage? And what are they going to say? They're in the game of lending money?

Yeah. They're like, what? Whoa. Yeah, there's fees and interest we're in.

Sure. So you get 2.7 million from the bank. We have to use 900,000 of that 2.7 million to pay the original mortgage off. Let's say we're on interest only. So we've now got 1.8 million left. Here's a question for you. Is it earned income? Is it salaried income?

No.

No. So there's no income tax on it. Was it the sale of something?

No.

No selling commission, no sales tax, nothing. It is tax free money free for you to do with as you please. And if we use that as a 10% deposit on another building, we can now buy an $18 million building plus our original. We're now at 21 million. That's going up with whatever the growth rate of real estate is. Now, full disclosure, we now have to pay interest on a $1.8 million loan. Well, 2.7 actually, now that I think about it, because we used 900,000. So we're paying, but we've got an asset worth 3 million that's generating rental income that if it doesn't cover the 2.7 million mortgage payment, we shouldn't refinance.

That's right.

So here's where people are going to kick themselves. I always say real estate is so good, Mac, because. Because when people retire, for the most part, their biggest asset is not the stamp collection that Uncle Tom told them one day would be worth a fortune. It's not the classic car that they said, if you renovate this one day it's going to be worth enough to retire on. It is singularly their home. And people will say, oh my gosh, if only we'd bought another one when we just got married. Or remember, honey, when the house next door was dilapidated and it was available for sale and no one, we kept on saying, I hope someone buys it. At least the grass will get cut. We should have bought it. So here's the thing. When you upgrade your home and people do, we stay in homes for an average of 6 years in this country. When you relocate instead of selling your home and then using the profit as a down payment on your next one and going up and up, if you do that, no matter how often you do it, you'll never be better off because with inflation, whatever home you want to transfer into has gone up by the same amount as well. What if you keep each home, just refinance, use the money from the refinance, it's tax free as a down payment, and then rent the first one out. Give you an example. I don't have that book with you. It's actually on the 101 Ways book. I've got a photo of a house my parents bought. I know, a long time ago. They're ancient. I'm ancient. 1968, they bought it for $5,000 and 10 years later they sold it for 32,000. And the significance of that is that profit. And they were ecstatic. They couldn't believe it. They'd never seen so much money. That profit was more money than my dad had earned in 10 years of having a job. And yet when you go online today and see what that house is worth, it's 875,000. They could have had an extra, you know, 800,000 plus dollars just by hanging onto it, plus another 40 or however many years of rental income. And so we don't realize that. So you don't need to sell real estate when it goes up.

So number four, you strip out equity unless you're in the state of New York doing it in New York. And the Attorney General of New York doesn't like the way you go refinance your properties. Then you get a fine of 550 million. Million.

Well do.

These are awesome, these four strategies. I just love it. I've loved real estate. And I have one last question for you.

Sure.

What is your favorite real estate investment you've made? Oh, and it can't be the helipad. That one's pretty cool. That one's pretty awesome.

But no, what's your favorite? You know my favorite. It's not even a big deal. I can talk about big deals. But I was reading in the time before the Internet became prevalent, we used to read the classified ads and newspapers, papers, and I looked for real estate for sale. And there was this little building at said Commercial Premise. It was a fish shop, a wet fish supply shop. So they had raw fish for sale there.

Where was it at? Where was it at?

This was down in New Zealand.

Okay.

Yeah, that's, that's where I, I grew up partially, anyway. Grew up. I'm still in the process of growing up, so that's all relative. But anyway, and it said, commercial building for sale, $59,000, 17% return. And I thought, there's a typo here. This can't be right, you know. And I didn't see the ad till Sunday night. So I called the agent as we those days, and he answered and I said, ah, I suppose it's gone by now. And he said, no, as a matter of fact, you're the first person to have bothered to call. And I thought because it sounded too good to be true. Too good. And that's the thing. If you don't do a deal because it sounds too good to be true, sure, you might avoid a lot of scams, but you've got to investigate them. You'll soon find out if it's a scam or not because you'll also miss out on a lot of great deals. So I investigate everything. Okay, check it out. So anyway, we went and looked at it the next day and I said, it just seemed crazy to me. Why is it this cheap? And he said, well, the owner is in his late 80s, he's in ill health, and he just wants to clear everything off his plate before he goes. So it's the first time I bought a property without submitting an offer. Usually I try it on, you know, put in an offer for something less. If they go for 5,000 less, that's the quickest $5,000 you'll make that day. Right. And always, by the way, ask when you buy a property, would the seller consider leaving some money in it? All in the form of a vendor carryback or seller finance. And nine times out of 10 they're going to say no, are you crazy? But every once in a I said sure, we'll do it. So that's a win. So anyway, I paid full price for it. It was rented out for every day. I mean, I never had a day of skip rent. It's just these deals are there. So. And that was commercial meaning if you are thinking of getting in commercial, don't delude yourself that you need a $40 million bank account to buy a big glass and concrete tower somewhere that is commercial. I've never bought one of those because I can't get the yields above 3 or 4%. You know, I go for oddball things. Oddball things where I've got a twist where I can do something to it. You and I find a thrift store down the road, say leased out at $12 a foot and we're worried about buying it because they've already indicated that they may not want to renew their lease. And most people go away. And what we would do is we'd hit up all the local coffee chains, right? There's Starbucks and Gloria Bean and Seattle's Best and then the lesser known ones and say, hey, how do you like this location? This is the foot traffic, this is the vehicle traffic going by. And we sign someone up at $24 a foot. When you double the rental on a commercial property, unlike residential, you double the value. So now we've got double the value. The bank says we're only going to lend you 50%. Well, guess what? 50% of double is the purchase price. So we're in it for no money. Why would you not do that? Wow. You know, so it's, it has all these possibilities. You're limited only by your creativity.

Do you still have the fish store?

You know, an earthquake took it down.

Oh no.

But my payout from the insurance company. Four times what I paid for it.

And you had rent all that time.

Rent all that time and fresh fish. And I got a great supply of fresh fish.

Do. It is such a pleasure to interview you. You're just delightful and fun and I could just listen to you all day.

Well, it's mutual. Your reputation precedes you too. So it's my absolute honor to be here, and I mean that.

Well, thank you. Now everybody, I want to get back to it. March 14, you're doing a little free. Tell us about it.

It's a live event on the. It's free, by the way. We're not after anything. It's just where I'm going to share how you can find, what you do to actually find these properties. How do you do it differently from just going on to the mls, Right? How do you find them then? How do you vet them? How do you figure out is this a good deal or not? Because if you don't know how to do that, you look at a property and say, well, what now? And then if you determine that it's a great deal, how do you take it down? What do you do to finance it? Where do you get the financing from? So we're going to share how to do that. Because in my mind, it's so mindlessly simple. Mac, again, completely.

Because you've done it so many times and you want to it with people.

Right. It's a matter of giving back. You know, it's just. It's so simple to do.

Well, I'm going to be there. I really am. Now, details down below. There'll be a link they can sign up.

Yep. The way to sign up for that directly is just go to dolflive.com so d o l f my first name live dot com. And if you happen to be listening to this afterwards, I've got a pretty rare name. It's Dolph Deroos. You can find me on the Internet with any variation of that dolphdorus.com and it will get you to all the things we do.

Oh, I love it. Well, love your books, love the creativity and just your energy. Appreciate it. And we'll. We'll have to have you back. I appreciate it.

I look forward to it. Thank you so much for the opportunity and no, it's been a lot of fun. Thank you.

Thank you.