Dion, Mike, and Christian Live!!!!

And welcome back to another episode of Multifamily Strategy Live. This is going out to some additional channels. So we got Dion here. Uh, who does way better on lives than me, by the way. So we should have some brand new people in the live here. I'm very excited for— we have Mike, who, uh, I don't know if you're sharing your channel or not, Mike, but may or may not be streaming to his channel as well. This is going to be a fun episode. We have an upcoming event May 3rd and 4th, Northwest Action Summit, co-hosted with Multifamily Strategy. These guys are friends who have spoke at a lot of events with me, some that I hosted, some of, uh, you know, sometimes just other people's events, but this is the best of the Seattle area right here. Both of them have awesome YouTube channels everyone should follow. All of us have different strategies, but Dion, Mike, welcome to the live.

Thank you.

By the way, my intro video, for all, all who know, first of all, that music just rips. I love that thing. Uh, second of all, uh, that gives me the 45 seconds I need to get everyone's lives live, so Uh, appreciate you guys being here. Luke, welcome to the chat. I know I'm fixing something for you on the back end of, uh, multifamily strategy. Know that I saw that request and I'm getting that going. We're probably gonna have a bunch of questions because we have a bunch of people on the live and we have some different faces here. So we're going to talk a little bit about our different strategies, how we got started, things we're going to cover at the Northwest Action Summit, get you guys a little preview, and then I vote we just dive right into questions and, uh and talk about different strategies. Dion, I want to start with you really quick. Dion actually turned me on to the Robin Hood Village Resort, was one of the first YouTubers I connected with. Most of what you see on my channel has some influence of him because, Dion, you really helped us set up most of the stuff.

I appreciate you coming on my channel, and I appreciate the invite to be on your channel. I think it's funny that you think I'm better at lives. I don't have intro music. I don't even have a studio right now. I took my studio down because I'm— I was building a closet and Still working on that.

You know what you have? You have more humans watching your live, and at the end of the day, that has more value. You affect more lives, Dion, with your live.

It's the whole reason why we're here. I'm actually doing a video next week on why I make content. Like, I want people to understand the very selfish reason why I'm here doing this.

He has a huge ego and he wants your vision. Everyone's eyeballs on Dion and that beautiful beard. Dion, talk a little bit about your strategy. For, uh, for those not joining from Dion's channel or who haven't seen Dion before, uh, Dion has a different strategy than me. It is probably technically the best strategy, um, and I have a few arguments for that. But, uh, Dion, how did you build your portfolio?

I, I think the— when you say best strategy, is that I, I fall back on the axiom that there is no one right way to invest in real estate. Or reach financial freedom, but there is a one right way for you. Your way is right for you. You didn't like your W-2. I loved my job. I worked for 4 more years after I reached financial freedom. It didn't work, didn't need to work. It wasn't until I figured out the math of time, the number 19, the Count of Monte Cristo reason, the 3 mistakes I was making, like all the things that lined up that said, hey, you should not be working. Part of it is I'm lazy, right? And so investing had to be not easy, but as easy as I can make it, because the more easy I could make it, the more likely I was to follow through. So I was working full-time, raising 3 kids as a single parent, working a side hustle to get money to invest. I couldn't invest in a strategy that would take something like I did this last 6 months doing a rehab. I wouldn't have started with that. I would have quit. I would have absolutely never touched another property in my life if I thought this was the way to do it. Now that I'm retired and have the time, I can go, yeah, it was a learning lesson, I didn't like it, but my performing portfolio that makes it to where I never have to work again in my life, it's absolutely worth pursuing. So I bought from the MLS, traditional lending, from conventional loans, right? No FHA. I've never— I haven't even used my VA loan yet. Save a down payment, buy a property, rinse and repeat every couple of years. It speeds up after a few years because the, you know, Einstein talks about the compound interest being the 8th wonder of the world. Well, compounding sources of income, I think, is also a wonder of the world. When you have your job, your side hustle, your rental, your rental, your rental, rent increases, inflation making us rich, and all of those things that happen to where now we start making so much money we can invest faster. And the last 5 years went a little bit faster than the first 5 years. And so I self-manage my rentals, I invest locally, I prefer a high cost of living area. So that's kind of a difference. The best thing I like about our community of investors is none of us are really doing the same thing, but all of us are using things that each of us can take and put into our own strategies. Um, so I invest not in Seattle but near Seattle. The last thing I would do is own in King County, Washington. Um, I have a small portfolio. I really like to follow Coach Carson, the Small and Mighty Investor. I take right out of his book, right out of One Rental at a Time. I just wanted to do one rental at a time, and Coach Carson's theory is, um, you don't need a big portfolio to retire. And what I wanted was I didn't want bragging rights on unit count. I don't want— I'm not trying to create generational wealth. I actually think that's a mistake, and you can hate me all you want, that's how I feel about it. Yes, my kids will inherit millions on accident, but that's not the goal. And I don't want them thinking that that's what they need to wait for so they don't have to be productive themselves. But I wanted the right amount of cash flow from the least amount of units, which lined up with me being lazy, which lined up with me wanting to add a few more units because 2 hours a month to manage them is, is, is worth it for me as a lazy person when I compare it to the 50 to 60 hours a week I was working my W-2 that I enjoyed. Love the job, but time freedom won out for me.

I love that. So you did a strategy with conventional finance over time in your backyard, not King County, but, you know, surrounding, uh, the surrounding areas that you live in, um, all local. How many years did you say it took you to build your portfolio from property 1 to retirement? How long did that take?

Possible retirement took 8 years, and then I worked for 4 more, and then I, instead of retiring at financial independence, I retired at what I would call consider almost fire. The definition I heard recently, I think during the Lumberjack Landlords livestream, is fat fire is 5 times your living expenses. I retired when I was 4. It has now passed 5, but it took another year of investing for that to happen.

Wow, it sounds like a rough place to be.

Yeah, no kidding.

It is when you start when you're 40. So then I say things like, well, I retired early at 52, and they go, is that even early? But if you start when you're 25 or 30 And then retiring is happening in your 30s or your 40s. That's definitely retiring early.

I like it. Mike, you, you obviously did the same thing, right?

Invest in your backyard, all conventional, uh, you know, other than shooting for a body positivity version of FIRE. Uh, no, no, nothing. No, Dion and I, I mean, we had similar lives in terms of, uh, we were both police officers, we both got married and failed, we both managed to get full custody of our children as men, and we both started from very, very, very difficult low position because a lot of people think, oh, maybe Dion started from a great position. He didn't. He had $300,000 of debt that he, that he started out with day one. I started my channel, my journey in real estate, $0 in the bank account, just had been divorced, no custody of my son, no college education. I grew up on Section 8 housing and food stamps myself. I was very poor, but I was watching all these videos from people like you who post things like, hey man, I got all these rentals and all these, this big portfolio.. And I was wondering if what they were saying was true and if they really could— if you really could become financially successful with real estate. And so my first video is me saying, I have nothing, I'm broke, I'm going to try to make it. And over the last 7 years I've been making videos. Took me about a year and a half to buy one, but over the last 7 years— so I started buying about 5 and a half years ago— I've been buying rental units and I got 27 rental units. I closed on a duplex last week. I closed on a fourplex the week before. But the thing that's major different between me and me and Dion, I did start with a house hack in the Seattle area and I still live in the duplex I house hacked right now. I'm still in one side of it that I've been in for 5 and a half years. Rents have skyrocketed. Now the rent from one side more than covers the mortgage. I live for free. But after I bought that first duplex, I said, man, everything here in Seattle is really expensive and I don't want to save 20% for a $600,000 property I should invest where the numbers make more sense. I grew up in the Midwest. Things are cheaper out there. So I started saying to myself, I'm going to look at other markets. And I started looking at other markets and I eventually stumbled upon the craziest market that anybody could conceive of. And that's Gary, Indiana. I am the king of Gary, in case you're wondering. And as the king of Gary, I have to defend it because it was the 1993 murder capital of the country, 3 times national poverty rate, 3 times the national crime rate. 13,000 abandoned buildings. Anybody who does a Google search of Gary says there's no way you could be successful investing there. But I got 27 units. And all of the problems you think you'll have over the last few years, I figured out how to ameliorate those problems, come up with creative solutions, build a team at a distance. I bought my first properties before ever even going there. I buy property sight unseen by putting the right team members in place. I've done creative financing, I've done seller financing, I've done the BRRRR strategy, I've used a HELOC to do the BRRRR. Everything you can think of, I've done in that area. And I'm not retired yet because, as I mentioned earlier, I have a much more body-positive version of the FIRE, and I want to get to fat— I want obese FIRE. And, and so I'm still working towards— well, we just call that standard weight in America FIRE, and that's what I'm working towards.

There we go. And, uh, yeah, for those, those watching who, uh, don't know my backstory, I, uh, I started out of college, immediately started, uh, a church that devolved into a cult that stole all my money and didn't let me speak for 100 days. Uh, so I also started with no money, had a bit of a, uh, a bit of a rough, uh, rough launch. Uh, that, that's, that's where my zero started from. Um, from there, went into a sales career, wanted to buy real estate, uh, had no money. Eventually got a career that got me my first 2 duplexes, more or less the Deon strategy. Worked a high-paying or high enough paying job, saved up, bought a few rentals, and I realized that I hated my job and buying a few rentals at a time was slow for me. So my next deal was a 38-plex. I bought seller financed and then bought a whole bunch of other properties. I've partnered, used seller financing, land contracts. Option contracts. I have executed a lot of deals in a lot of weird ways, um, but put together a 200+ unit portfolio with, uh, starting with legitimately no money. There are multiple ways to play the game. I have way more headaches than Dion and probably a lot more headaches than Mike. Uh, we have a lot of stuff that happened. Mike, I've had water damage wipe out completely without insurance, uh, more units than you own this year.

Yikes.

Ouch.

Cover something under a builder's insurance if the roof's over 20 years old and the pipe— that combination of things is not covered by any insurance anywhere.

Yikes.

Yeah, and I'll be sharing on my YouTube channel next week on how I got paid to get out of that deal. So I bought it zero down and then someone else is paying me to fix it. So, um, maneuvering the pieces appropriately. Real estate is fun and we love playing the game. We're all going to be talking about our different strategies in the, uh, at the actual event and different pieces of how we played the game. I know I'm going to be covering specifically a few different types of creative finance that I think are simple and repeatable, which means basically a bunch of things that are not subject to. Um, Mike, what are you going to be covering at the event? Have you picked exactly what your topic is going to be for this?

Yeah, so actually I got asked to cover a couple of things. So one of the things that I was asked to cover by Kurt, uh, he, he reached out, um, And he said that the event on Friday night, the VIP event, he wanted me to specifically talk about the way that I've used creative financing because I've done it different than you, because creative financing literally incorporates anything that is not traditional financing. So any way you can think of to structure a deal is creative financing. So the opportunities are endless. And so Friday night I'm going to be talking about that. And then the main event, which is Saturday, I'm going to be talking about what I always talk about. Which is how to get started investing at a distance. Most people who live in overpriced coastal markets like California or New York or Florida or Seattle, they say to themselves, I wish I could invest where the numbers make sense. I see these cheap properties in the Midwest. How do I do it? I don't know how, so I'm not going to figure it out because I don't want to get taken advantage of. And I don't blame you because you don't want to lose your money. But what I cover in most of when Dion and I present or when I presented in the past, some of your events is Why don't we talk about the actual things you can do to overcome the hurdles and obstacles that are keeping you from seriously taking a market in the Midwest more seriously so that you could actually invest where the numbers make sense? And I help people get over that hump.

Love it. Dion, what's your, what's your, your core focus of this event?

Apparently I'm going to read through some emails and texts and see if Kurt also sent me things he would like me to cover because I think I'm in the same path as Mike. Um, I usually start with a couple of questions. Is there anybody here who hasn't heard of the binder strategy, right? That, that's like, I want to make sure that gets covered everywhere I go because that's information that helps tenants and landlords. So I want to get that out there. I usually talk about the processes that make owning real estate easier because real estate investing is time-consuming. It's not passive. It takes a lot of time, takes a lot of effort. Real estate ownership can be passive and here's the checklist that I go through to make sure it's as passive as possible, which made me more likely to add units to my portfolio. Then figuring out what it takes to actually reach financial freedom and to stay in financial freedom.

Is that a shot glass, Dion? What is that?

Got stuck into the room. Am I supposed to not take a shot?

You get lit on the live?

I can't drink all day unless you start early, Mike.

This is what happens in weekend lives with, uh, with Dion and Mike. Oh, there's somebody on here. Mike, is that— is that also a shot glass?

No, I have my Master Chief mug full of money, but that's all I— and then a glass of water because I'm boring.

Fun fact, I'm replaying those series. I've never got past the original Xbox, but, uh, finally finished, uh, Halo 1. I don't do a lot of recreational things, so it only took me 1 year to finish Halo 1, but I got it done. I did the thing.

Oh, you know what? I don't play many video games as an adult because I just don't have time to learn new video games. So I just continue to replay the ones from when I was a kid. But my son and I— my son who's 7 years old— they have on Xbox called the Master Chief Collection, which is like the first 4 games all in one series. My son and I play those games together as our bonding time, and it is a lot of fun.

I will commit to getting this system that has 4 games. I wasn't aware that Halo went all the way to 4, so I apparently have more story than I was aware existed. Apparently technology has advanced since I was in high school. Oh, that makes me happy. All right, we have some questions that have come up here. I'm going to try to cherry-pick the best ones outside of the first comment, which was whoop, which is an excellent first, uh, starting comment. Um, I'm gonna go see if I can't snag a question or two here from the chat. We'll go through and see what we can teach a few Um, people, let's see here. Oh, okay. I, I don't know if you guys work a lot with Section 8, but I, I can snag this one really quick. Uh, you mentioned, uh, Christian Osgood, housing authority can pay off, uh, bad debt. How does that work? So this was especially prevalent during COVID This is actually how I launched the 38-plex, and this is really the strategy that launched my career. Section 8 for a while, and it wasn't just Section 8, but it was various housing authority projects would actually pay the back due rent. As well as a few months of future rent for tenants who had fallen behind. So we picked up a lot of properties during the pandemic, specifically— well, I just said the word, so now YouTube's probably gonna kill our views. Uh, you have to go market where 40, 45 people are watching and only like 43 of them are from Dion's channel. Um, watch the number just all of a sudden just get cut. Um, But during that time when the thing happened, I picked up a lot of properties from landlords who were like, I am tired of this, I'm out of the game, people aren't paying rent. And we went ahead and picked up the property and the government just paid their rent. It was like magic. There are still programs where tenants will get caught up. They're a little bit harder to get through, but we just processed this with a tenant last week. Nice. If you network well with your local housing authorities and you try to work with your tenants. It's just having a clear line of communication with them. Here's the situation this person is in. What are their options? How do we help them? If you have a tenant who legitimately needs help and goes through the right channels, you can often have a solution to get them caught back up without having to evict. And that's even in a state like Washington where our programs are terrible. I've, I've noticed it's a lot easier in the properties that I own in Texas. Like, someone needs help, I can just call the housing authority and they basically just get help within a few weeks. It's amazing. Washington, it will take a few months, but you can still do that, and that is a Section 8, uh, thing.

What works in Washington is Section 8 has access to a lot of nonprofits and agencies that will cover things like deposits or bad debt. And there's a lot of things about the Section 8 program that most people just never learn. I mean, they'll do rent by the room. Most people don't know that you can use that strategy— rent out each room to a Section 8 tenant. They— the tenants should understand that, because I try to encourage every tenant I've ever had when I'm doing a lease signing, I say, you shouldn't be renting. You understand you live in a duplex? You can go buy one of these, live in one side, rent out the other, and live almost rent-free. Let me help you do that. I'll introduce you to a lender, I'll introduce you to an agent. And in a decade, only one person has ever bought a house. But Section 8 will help a Section 8 tenant buy a house. Part of that program is to get on the property ladder, and still haven't had any of those try to use that program either.

And most— I've noticed most people won't. I know there's a lot of people who are fine being tenants or just don't want to own real estate, and that's totally fine. That's a huge reason why rental properties work, is there are always going to be renters. I love that you help people go through that though. I've only, I've only ever had one tenant actually reach out and want help owning a place, and we actually did help them. So it's happened once in a 200-something person portfolio, which means like what, our 200 units, that's probably 300 people. One person, one time, 0.03%. Yeah, uh, success ratio low, but you know, you do the right things and you just try to move everyone forward. I love that that's happening. Mike, Gary, Indiana, that's, that's known for being such a high-income place. Uh, I'm kidding. Uh, have you done any work with Section 8 or Housing Authority over in Gary?

Yes, yes, I, I love the Section 8 program. I highly advocate that if you're investing in low-income areas, you should primarily focus on partnering with Section 8. I think that the hardest— the people that get hit hardest when the economy turns, as we saw during the pandemic, uh, were the people who were lower income or have those jobs near the bottom and can't work from home, and they're not white-collar like the units that I— the unit I have here in Seattle. And so if you partner with Section 8, the government always pays. And to Dion's point, they'll rent by the room. They'll also pay you for an entire building. You could have a fourplex. Section 8 will just pay you for the whole building and then put tenants in there one at a time. There's, there's a lot of different opportunities there. Um, one of the interesting stats I share about Gary a lot is that there's 2,700 vouchers for the city of Gary. Only 650 are filled. There's a discrepancy of over 2,000 vouchers for people who want to get housing and cannot find it. And so if you provide that housing, you're going to have guaranteed income from the government. And on that note, I'm going to swap my battery out because my camera's about to die, but I'm not leaving.

Don't worry. Okay, Michael, we'll see you again very shortly. In the meantime, from Strider, by the way, Mike is Millennial Mike on YouTube. Dion is Dion Talk Financial Freedom. Granted, a vast majority of you guys are here, uh, from Dion's channel. So about, according to the stats right now, about 80% of you already know that, which is weird because your channel is blowing up.

There should be more people here on your channel. I mean, you have over 50,000 subscribers now.

I mean, of this three, you are still the king of lives. You get more attendance to lives, your lives go longer, and I guess that means you just provide more value. That's, uh, that's the only logical explanation there.

Um, I think, um, intimidating to anybody because I'm not good looking.

You know, the better looking you are, the more intimidating you are. So yeah, it's, it's the beard and the voice. And Dion's aware that he's just an attractive human being. There's nothing we can do about it. Uh, Mike has a target on his face now, but— oh, there we go, it's gone. That is crazy. You have a nicer camera than I do.

Well, that's debatable.

No, mine will track me if I give it the signal. It will start tracking my face or zoom in. I can, I can communicate with sign language to my camera, which is actually kind of fun.

Good for shorts, not great for long form.

No, no, it gets very obnoxious. Um, let's see here from Strider though. Where do I go to learn different financial options? Um, I think I just answered that question. All three of these channels, we talk about different ways to buy fun deals. We all have different strategies. I would personally say the best thing that you can do is go out, set your goal, and then just figure out who's done what you want to do the way you want to do it and stick with that strategy. If you're someone who's in a W-2 right now and you're like, I love my job, or I can tolerate my job, and I want to do this in the— I would say Dion's strategy, I think we'd all agree, has the least amount of overall risk in it because it's slow, methodical, the longest-term fully amortized debt. If you can withstand the job and take a little bit more time, you probably want to follow Dion's channel very specifically and do exactly what Dion says. If you're someone who is likely on the younger side, more aggressive, or just can't stand working for people, you might follow my channel. Oh, the multifamily strategy. Let's check this out. Build a couple hundred unit portfolio and go through a ton of pain. And the fun is in the adventure. And yeah, it makes a lot of money, but it's also like, it's way more stressful. And then Mike, I think you fall pretty much perfectly in the middle. You've bought stuff conventionally more than I have. Uh, you have a manageable size portfolio that's still growing rapidly, and you've used every method under the sun to pick up 27 units, which is awesome. Depending on who you are and how aggressive you want to go, I think you have 3 perfect examples of kind of, you know, uh, you have your 3 bowls of porridge here. Uh, good luck, Goldilocks, pick a bed and stick with that.

So I think there's an order of operations to it. And first, I would start with what is something most people are doing, right? Go talk to an actual lender, one of the big banks— Wells Fargo, Chase, Bank of America. They have the most standardized criteria. You might be in the perfect situation to do an owner-occupied or a conventional loan to buy a property, but if you don't have the 2 years consistent income, a high enough salary to cover the debt-to-income ratio for those first 2 years when you don't have rental income, Maybe DSCR is your option, right? If you don't have the credit score or the net worth for DSCR to be an option, then you can look at seller financing, right? So you kind of go through the chain to see what works for you and then match it up with your strategy as well.

I love this comment. All hail to the King of Gary! We worship you.

All right, it's my boy right there, lord of all Mr.

Landlords.

He's the man. He is, he is an absolute Dave Ramsey advocate, and he loves to roast me in all my videos about how I use debt and Dave doesn't, but he is also a huge supporter of the channel. As you can see, he's here hanging out.

So I'll tell you what, you show me the Dave Ramsey follower who retired before 50 and then we'll have a conversation.

Who has an active income of less than $350,000?

The very few. $350,000, $500,000 based on the advice. It's not happening.

There you go. Vast majority of people cannot earn enough income. I, I, this is my only problem with Dave's thing is like Dave, his last net worth that I heard him say was like $700 million. Mm-hmm. Um, which I think it's actually higher than that. But if you make millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars a year, you can absolutely save your way to financial freedom. And that is about it. Um, everyone else, we're gonna lever at some point. Dylan, how have you prepared for a recession? What's your plan if like 20% of income gets cut? Mike, how are you preparing for a recession?

Well, that's a good question. If he's talking about income from my rental portfolio, well, I have Section 8. What do you mean 20% of it gets cut? How is it going to get cut? The government pays. Look at the last recession. Did Section 8 stop paying at any point? No. Did Section 8's payment go down? No. And one of the things that Dion's going to say, which I'm going to steal from him, we always plan for a major cut in rent. We plan our portfolio out and we run our numbers as if there was a 50% cut in rent coming next year. But it's never happened. Every single time over the last 115 years that they've been tracking rent, they track it in 5-year increments, and there has not been a single time where rent has ever been down over a 5-year period ever. During the Great Recession, it dropped like 2 or 3% for a year and a half, and it recovered. That's it. So how do I plan? Well, I've already set up the planning by having Section 8, by doing my research on what rental rates do, and also by buying properties with enough of a profit that even if I took a 50% cut to rent, I would still be able to cover all of my expenses. Sure, I wouldn't be making money, but I wouldn't be losing money. And then for my personal job, this is Maybe the question he was asking was for your personal job, because I still have, unlike you two, I have a W-2 job. I'm a police officer. Well, the good thing is, is that when recessions happen, what does crime do? Goes up. So I'm, I'm pretty well insulated given my seniority as a police officer that they would have to pretty much dissolve the agency I work for of 1,000+ officers for me to get fired.

You know, I'm—

it would, it would be very hard to get to a point where I would get fired.

And all of us use long-term debt. So if there's a short-term dip in the market, our expenses don't change, which is the main thing that really gets landlords when interest rates spike. Or when oftentimes when there's a recession, what we see is there's a little lag, and then all of a sudden the banks just tighten up and you cannot borrow money anymore. That's where a lot of people get pinched, is when you're cycling debt. So none of us use short-term debt.

No, and that was Dave Ramsey's issue of 90-day debt. But for Dylan's question, planning on a recession, Mike, yes, there's 3 things I've done. The 3rd one is plan on rents coming down, even though since 1940 when we started tracking the data, rents have never once gone down. Plan on them dropping 50%, and I still wouldn't have to go back to work. But the first 2 is I diversified in 2 specific ways. The first one is my properties are at least 10 miles apart. I have 2 that are 7 miles apart, but the rest are at least 10 miles apart. Pulling tenants from multiple sources so that if a base, a port, college, Amazon, Boeing, or something closes or moves away, I'm only impacted on one part of my portfolio. The other way is I diversify my tenant base. I keep one-third Section 8, one-third working and retired, and one-third military so that if there is a pandemic, a prolonged government shutdown, a stock market crash, I— my entire portfolio is not impacted. We make specific plans hoping, just like all of the crash bows, that there's a crash so we can go shopping. But we're planning our portfolios around those things happening, even though some of them never have.

Mike, you have a good point here. Yeah, Dylan, Dylan, uh, for those who don't have Dylan in their, uh, in their lives often, Dylan, Dylan will ask the questions. Dylan, by the way, is 18. So, uh, yeah, right, don't— learning all of the questions early, I will personally fly out there and slap you if you don't buy something, uh, because you are spending the time on your education and learning it. I appreciate, uh, the contribution enough so that I'll— we'll do one more Dylan question and then we'll, uh, we'll move on to some other people. I do like this one. What does your guys' time management look like for family life, real estate? This I know for a fact this looks different for all three of us, um, Dion, what does it look like for you with your, uh, with your family? You guys both mentioned you have full custody of kids, and all of us have, uh, you know, families who are different ages or different individuals.

But, uh, Dion, so currently my kids are over 18, so I did like every parent should and said, happy birthday, here's a restraining order. But up to the age of 18, I house hacked. I, I worked a job and I played World of Warcraft as a side hustle to sell things online so that I could, like Mike does, play with this kid for their bonding time. I played online games with my kids for that, that time together. Um, always had full custody, spent a lot of time with my kids. I invested in a way that was, like I said, it's time-consuming but as passive as possible, right? I wasn't out driving for dollars, I wasn't filling out mailers, I wasn't doing all of the creative strategies. I was talk to an agent once, have them set up auto searches, and for the next 3 or 4 years I look at the searches that come in 15 minutes a day and just, you know, everything was done as easily as possible when it came to the time constraint. So for the most part, my kids didn't know that I was investing because it didn't take up a lot of time. They usually didn't know I had a job because, like Mike is doing right now, I work nights. They'd go to bed, I'd go to work, they'd get up and go to school, I'd come home and sleep, I'd wake up when they got home from school.

Yeah. Mike, what does your— what does your schedule look like? How do you manage, uh, real estate SWAT, having a kid. I mean, that's— you have a lot going on.

So I'm a single father with full custody of my son. Uh, I am the sole parent. The other parent's not in the picture at all, haven't seen her in years. Uh, police officer, SWAT officer, which means I'm subject to being called out in the middle of the night. I've been on SWAT for over 5 years. Full-time real estate investor as well. I spent a lot of time learning and buying and working my real estate. I have a YouTube channel that I am dedicated to uploading pretty consistently. On. I work out a lot because given the nature of my job, it's very important to be in good physical fitness. And so people ask me this all the time, how do you do it all? And I always jokingly just say, I don't believe in sleep. It's against my religion. I just— that's where I sacrifice. And of course I do sleep, but I sleep 4 or 5 hours a night. For Dylan specifically, Dylan, you're 18 years old. You don't need work-life balance. Work-life balance is something that your wife's going to say to you in 12 years when you're married to make you spend more time at home. Right now, you're a superpower. You are superhuman. At 18 years old, you can run through anything. You can live life off bad decisions and caffeine, man. You are— you heal like Wolverine. You could stay up for 24 hours in a row, sleep for 3 minutes, wake back up and do another 24 hours. Right now is your time to have 3 jobs and still live with mom and dad, save every single penny of money that you have. Dump it into the account. It's going to be titled the Don't Let Christian Slap Me Account. That's the account where all the money is going into. And over the next 2 years, while you're working these 3 jobs, you're just going to save and save and save and save and save. And then you're going to go and buy your first property. Or while you're saving that money, you're going to do what Caleb did and just make 1,000 phone calls while you're on your second 24-hour binge in a row. Make those 1,000 phone calls until you get the deal. You do not need work-life balance. You're at the perfect age to do nothing but crush it for the next 5 years. And if you do that for 5 years, I promise you, bro, you'll be so much further ahead than any of us doing this live right now.

Yep. For me, I have 200 rentals. I own the property management company. I am the CEO position for Multifamily Strategy, which has the education. So I'm coaching multiple times a week. 3 times a week, 3 hours a week, and a ton of time goes into the planning of those. I film for YouTube almost daily. I'm, uh, let's see, what do I do? I travel an average of 4 times a month to speak around the country. And, um, yeah, I have a couple other companies that I also run. So I'm the CEO of like 4, 4 entities, and then I run a lot of the on-site for renovations. I have the Mike policy of I— there's no reason why I would not be working right now. So I just, I cut sleep. If there's work to be done, we just get it done. I think over the last 4 years I've filed 28 different LLCs for the various partnerships or projects that we have. Um, so tax season takes me an additional just like straight month of daily work to get through. Yeah, it's a ton of work to do this. If you want to go faster than everyone else, I have found you just outwork everyone. And if you happen to be the age of like Mike or I, uh, who are a little bit on the younger end, we have, in my opinion, the squishiest competition that we have seen in this country in a very, very, very long time. And if you want to just steamroll everyone else who wants to be financially free by posting videos 3 times a day on Instagram and not doing anything, um, you will absolutely dominate your competition by being the only one putting in the activity. And I found it has been very easy to pass up most of the rest of my peers, as, uh, as, as Mike obviously has with 27 rentals and a full-time job and a kid. There's a lot of people who have a kid who are like, oh, this, this kid is everything and it takes all my time and there's no way I could do more and I'm maxed. Um, if you can set aside all the excuses and just do the thing especially at 18. It took me till 29 to figure that out. If you'd start that at 18, you're going to be in more of the, uh, the Cody Davis, Caleb Hommel camp of more money than you can spend and not old enough to have to pay for your own health insurance. It's a good place to be. Go-to tenant screening software? I go throughout Folio. Dion, what do you use?

My brain. Uh, for a while I was using Apartments.com, right? Because all I want is a platform that's going to run their credit and give me an eviction history. Other than that, I'm not looking at anything. I'll verify work just to see if I can catch them in a lie. But I'm slowly transitioning my properties as I have tenant turnover or acquire a new property. I'm putting them on the Hemlane platform. Hemlane works great for me because it's got 3 tiers, so I keep the most cost-effective tier. It's like $28 a month plus $2 per unit, right, to be on there. Lets me collect rents, sign leases, um, not sign leases, uh, dispatch handymen, those kind of things. They've got the two other tiers. So what, like, this winter my plan is to be— as long as the stupid fur is over, which should be done this week, I'll be in Thailand for most of the winter. If I have a tenant turnover while I've gone that month, I'll step up to tier 3, have an agent go out and do a lease signing, and I'll drop back down to tier, you know, the lowest tier as soon as that's over. So I've got that flexibility to travel and self-manage my properties. So Hemlane is where I'm going now. Are you an affiliate with Hemlane? See, you should be. I'll connect you with Dana if you like. It gets your people who watch your channel, if you promote it, 20% off their first year.

No way.

Your name or something.

Mine is—

you know what's amazing? I, I was told that somewhere around 10,000 subscribers, people reach out on YouTube to like sponsor or do 50,000 subs later, I think I'm about to crack, uh, 60. No one ever— no one has ever reached out to have me sponsor anything ever.

No money. I'm surprised because it was about 8,000 for me and I get 2 or 3 emails a day of, we'll send you $1,000 for every video you make about the Ridge Wallet, or we'll do this or we'll do that. And I'm just sitting back going, none of that lines up with my— I made one Ridge Wallet one. I was like, look, there's a terrible wallet. I'd never own one. So they're not coming back.

Oh, I love the Ridge Wallet. What are you talking about?

Oh, you need the Flip. The Flip is so much better.

No, the Ridge Wallet is money.

There we go. Flip, if you're watching this, sponsors.

This is RFID protection. This is everything that you want all in one spot. No hunting through 15 freaking cards and IDs with one stupid little thumb thing that— there you go. That's my opinion of the Ridge and why I don't have sponsors on my channel.

The boomer is being exposed right now. All right, okay, the Ridge Wallet is sleek.

I just want the satisfaction of declining the sponsorships. I don't get that. Everyone— I'll feel like I made it when I get to say no to a sponsorship, but there's no one to say no to. Everyone's like, okay, you're garbage, we hate you. They're like, oh, I think people watch my channel and they go like, you know what would be awesome? Let's check out Dion's channel and see if he'll sponsor something. Probably. Mike, do people reach out to you for sponsorships?

You know what, uh I had, I had a few. So I have a bunch of different social media accounts, Instagram, TikTok, all that stuff. And I had a TikTok that was not related to real estate investing at all, just comedy stuff about being a police officer. And it had a few hundred thousand subscribers. And I did get some people that reached out there and I just said no to everything because the only things that I would ever agree to sponsor would be stuff I actually use. Like if DocuSign reached out, I'd be like, yes, I love DocuSign. If Ridge Wallet, I would say yes, specifically to spite Dion and because I use Ridge Wallet for the last several years. But, uh, I, I— it would probably be a lot of rejection because there's a lot of— the ones that were always reaching out to me were always like some shady weird stuff, and I was like, nah, I'm good.

Okay, well, I'm calling it now on this channel. Selkirk Pickleball Paddles, reach out. I will sponsor you. I will hold the paddle through every video if I have to.

I'll connect some of the sponsors that reach out to me to your channels.

How's that? Perfect. I, I need someone to decline. That is perfect. Um, then I can be part of the club. No, that's, that's funny. I've always wondered about that because Dion's like, oh yeah, no, people reach out every day. I was like, nope, nope, not seeing that. Do I— am I hooked up to the wrong email here? Funny stuff. Has Dion or Mike— well, I read that in reverse. That was weird dyslexia. Um, has Mike or Dion used 50%, 40%, 10% ever? Uh, is the bank part mostly found from DSCR lenders? So I guess just in general, let's just talk about the debt products that you most typically use. Dion, when you're closing a property, what is your go-to product?

I like conventional loans. I've made some offers on DS— on, uh, 50/40/10s because you have to find the right seller. You have to find somebody who has enough equity where they can carry the 40% and they're not trying to have a capital gains hit. Uh, none of my offers stuck, right? They ended up going conventional for some— for whatever reason. Uh, it's a great option. I would check out Velocity Mortgage. He talks on Zuber's channel often about his 50/40/10 option that they have. That's Stephen Dow. Um, but I like— you just go to a bank and you just say, I have the down payment, here's my criteria, this is the house I'm buying. Super simple. I was too lazy to develop any of those other strategies. I, I think what I've found is almost everybody who's trying to use creative is saying— and I don't mean to offend anybody— but they're saying, I can't save a down payment. That's the problem. And so if you can't save a down payment, it's not like you magically start learning how to save when you have more money. So I think the best thing on your first couple of deals, like the 3 of us did on that first house hack, you save a down payment, use a conventional loan, you figure out, okay, this is what it's like to have a tenant in the other unit or whatever. And you go, okay, now I've got my legs under me. I kind of understand real estate. Now let me look at the strategy that works for me.

Oh, uh, actually, I wanted Mike's answer to that too, and then we'll, we'll hop to the next question. That's also specifically for Mike. Mike, uh, go-to debt product, do you have one?

So everything that I do is aiming for a 30-year fixed rate debt at the end. That's where I want the product to end at. And you can get 30-year fixed rate debt on up to 8 units with Convoy Home Loans and Velocity Mortgage. You can get that type of 30-year fixed rate debt on larger properties. So I have bought owner-occupied 30-year fixed rate debt. I've done the BRRRR strategy into 30-year fixed rate debt. And then I've obviously— my end goal is always that, because as you mentioned earlier, Christian, it's guaranteed, it's no variables, you know what your costs are. It's one of the ways you plan for a recession. However, to get to that point, there's a lot of different bridge debt that you can use, and some of it's even called a bridge loan. And there's actual people, hard money providers, there's, there's private money providers. And so what I did is I created my own debt product. I invented what I call the slow BRRRR strategy. The problem with the BRRRR strategy is, okay, I got to buy this, remodel it, at the 6-month mark, I got to cash out. What happens if interest rates suck at the 6-month mark? Or what happens if the appraisal sucks and doesn't come back where I want? Do I keep holding this hard money that's costing me a lot of money, or do I wait and try to refinance? It's just very tough. So I created the private money strategy that I use because private money is way better than hard money. And what I do is the people that are in my network, a lot of them have savings accounts and a lot of their savings accounts pay 2%, 3%, 4%, something that's a joke. And I say, what if instead of having all that money in your savings account, you lend it to me and I put it as a private mortgage in a promissory note on this piece of real estate that I bought? And instead of you getting paid 2, 3, or 4%, I'll pay you 10% on your money and I'll pay you out 10% a year and I'll pay you every single month. Every month you get a check from me. It's interest only. And now what's my term on that loan? I have a 5-year term. But I have no prepayment penalty and I have an option to extend 3 more years in case there's some sort of like major economic crash. So they're going to get a guaranteed 10% on their money, double what a Treasury pays, double what a CD pays, way more than what their savings account will pay. They're going to get a much higher return from me. It's secured against the real estate and I now get to do the BRRRR strategy and pick when I do my cash-out refi. I'm not inhibited by the time factors anymore. So I've done it on a bunch of different properties, and that's how I invented to create a financing strategy that worked for me.

I love that. We need to do an episode on multifamily strategy talking about the slow burr method. That is cool. Yeah, yeah.

The amount of puns that I put in the video that I made on it was disgusting. It's like, don't get burned, get slow burned. It was bad. It was real bad. It was dad jokes.

Yeah, I won't go into my preferred methods because I have done, is it 10 or 11? I've done 11 different unique structures in my last 17 deals. Um, I only follow 2 rules. Deal first, then find the debt and equity that best matches your deal. And it could be the slow burr, it could be private money, hard money, it could be seller financing contracts, it could be an option agreement with an option to seller finance in the future. I mean, there are a million ways you can knock it out. But it's find the opportunity and don't get distracted with the favorite debt product that you want to use. I find the deal and then the deal will tell me what money we need to bring in. And that is the advice I'll give to everyone. Deal first. The deal is harder to find than the money. And then find the money that matches your deal because there are more options for money than there are for properties. At the end of the day, properties, cash flow, long-term fixed rate debt, Good to go. If you have a project in there like Mike's example, you may have bridge money, but you need a clear path to get it into your long-term cash-flowing fixed-rate debt, which is what Mike's version is going to be, um, based upon. It is a project that when he completes checks all the boxes. Uh, specifically for Mike, when you network with local people in the area you're focusing on What types of groups do you focus on? Facebook real estate groups, etc. What are some examples? How do you find the people when you live— I don't know how many thousands of miles Gary, Indiana is. You're a long ways away, like a 3-day drive, so I assume you're not just popping over there. How do you network?

It's a good question. So what I always tell people, the first thing that they need to do if you're considering investing at a distance, the most important person on your out-of-state investing team It's not your property manager. It's not your real estate agent. It's not your contractors, your handyman, the wholesalers. It's none of those people. It's the person that you never thought about, and that's the other investors in that market that are already doing things right. So if I wanted to learn how to house hack in the Pacific Northwest, I need to find Dion. If I wanted to learn how to buy creatively financed larger multifamily properties in the Pacific Northwest or Texas, I need to find Christian Osgood. Well, how do I find them? Well, where are they? They're in Facebook groups. They're on YouTube. They're on Instagram. A lot of these investors like me, as I jokingly call myself the King of Gary, because I'm the only person who makes YouTube videos about Gary, Indiana. And so what I tell people to do when you want to connect with other investors, you need to go to Facebook and you need to type in Indiana real estate investing groups. 20 groups are going to pop up. Join them all. And then, okay, the state of Indiana is pretty big. What about Indianapolis Investor Facebook group? What about South Bend? What about Gary, Indiana? And then you join those groups and you start reading through the posts and looking at who's posting deals, who's posting their success stories, who's posting bad experiences they had. And you just start commenting and networking and friend requesting and sending messages and asking to chat with these people. Most people love to talk about themselves. Most people love to talk about the things that they're doing that are right, and most people love to talk trash about the people who ripped them off. So give these people an opportunity to teach you and shut up and listen. So you start with Facebook, then you move over to YouTube. I make this comment all the time, even with Christian's 50,000 subscribers and Dion's 20,000 subscribers and my 9,000 subscribers. If you type into YouTube real estate investing, you could scroll through 100 pages of search results and not see a video from any of us. But if you type in Gary Indiana real estate investing, the first 100 pages are all me. First 100 videos, all my videos. So just get super specific with what you're searching because there's somebody in every city, in every market, in every real estate market in the country. There's one or two people, smaller traders like me, who have the time to talk to you who will share their network and team with you if you just look hyper-specific in the area that you're interested in. And you start building those connections, and then those people will connect you to everyone else on your team, to include property managers, real estate agents, handymen, contractors, all that stuff.

Two things on that really quick.

Yep, go, go, go, Dan.

So the first thing is my— I have a nephew in California, and he just started a handyman, um, business, right? It's challenging in California to do that, but he's got everything in place to do that. And I gave him the exact same advice. I said, you want to find investors that are looking for handyman work, go on Facebook, join the local groups, network with the people, and you get as specific as you can to the area that you're at, and you'll find groups of people. Because every time I've gone to a real estate meetup with investors, everyone goes, who's the handyman here? What plumber do you use? What electrician is on your list? And the second thing is, if you do something like start a YouTube channel or put content out on Instagram to let people know what you're doing so that people will bring you deals. Be very careful with the videos that you make, because Mike, if somebody looks up investing in Gary, Indiana, or investing at a distance, Millennial Mike pops up. If multifamily comes up, the Multifamily Strategies comes up, right? Do me a favor, goof off, open another tab on your computer and type in $89,000 in bad debt. That's how you find me. I didn't think that through in the first year of making YouTube content, but hey, here we are.

Winning. Uh, that's funny. That it all comes down to like find the people who don't, you wanna do a network with them. And, and Mike, I, the one thing I wanna highlight from what you said was everyone bitches about the people who rip them off. And that has saved me or should have saved me so much money in the past. Every time I didn't listen to that, I, I had someone, uh, buy, I partnered with someone cuz I needed $550,000 very badly. And they bought into an LLC for $550,000, solving my immediate problems. I had an investor who I trusted call me and say, just so you know, if you do this, you're partnering with the devil. And I was like, acceptable, need this. Um, it was very, very, very rough. Still think it was probably the right decision, but, uh, because I did in fact need the money and that was the path of least resistance, but it was exactly as awful as advertised. When you get to know who not to work with, that is, I would argue, probably more valuable than who to work with. The, the people who will rip you off cost a lot of money, and you usually have to do the work twice when it comes to contractors, vendors, property managers, lawyers. Uh, that piece of the game, worth its weight in gold. Can you gentlemen talk about why it's important to continuously vet your Team agents, title escrow contractors, PMs. I'm fairly confident, unless Dion's done more of this than I'm aware of, I think I've fired massively more people than Dion and Mike. I have fired a lot of people, uh, in my companies or in other roles. I am all about building a team. Here, here's my belief: if you want to compete at an A-level, so you want to have a championship-level team, you need to have A-players. Which means if I have B players on my team, they get cut. And if that sounds brutal, it is. It is the level that I personally want to play at. So for me, I cycle through CPAs often until I found the right one, who Matt the Lumberjack Landlord turned me on to and changed my universe. I finally got an A player in that slot. But for me, I will keep— I will keep moving forward So you put whoever you can get in the position, in the position. Like, first of all, like, don't let this stop you from moving forward because too many people do that. They wait to build their team forever because they read it in a book, and that— you don't have to do that. Buy real estate, and if you have a C-level accountant, still file your taxes, but eventually cycle these people out and build a better team. I probably do this monthly, if not weekly, review everyone in my universe and go are the people that I'm working with, are they a temporary fix? Is this a long-term team member? Is this someone who I eventually want to be an equity partner with? Like, what level do I want to go with these people? I hate partnering, so I only will partner with the best of the best of the best of the best from who I've worked at with. And still sometimes I get screwed. Um, I think it's one of the most important things that you can do. That's my opinion. I've, I've fired over 40 people in the last 4 years, um, either employees or, uh, or like direct contractors. I've done a lot of editing my team, and I think it is probably the least talked about biggest piece of the little bit of success that I have in real estate is doing that.

So this is something where I, uh, weirdly have a contrarian viewpoint on Oh, let's do it.

I love these. This is what everyone's waiting for.

You definitely have more experience firing people. And that's the right thing. I take that right from Matt the Lumberjack Landlord, right? Hire slow, fire fast. If it's not working, it is better to have a hole on your team than an a-hole on your team. Absolutely agree. So Christian, your experience on that, you should definitely make some videos covering this is the thing that pushed me over the threshold to cut this person. I hear people talking about their team often.. And if you're going to invest at a distance, sure, you need your core 4. If you're going to invest locally— and I'm going to say this very clearly because my mom said, if you don't have something nice to say, speak clearly— I do not have a team. I don't want a team. I want my lenders to hate my guts. I want my agents to be uncertain if they even want to work with me, because every single time I've done a deal, I vet several estimates on lending. I go through the same order of operations. All of the agents that I work with know that I'm working with multiple agents. It's the only way that they're going to work with me. AutoSearch is set up and you'll make the money if you send me the deal. Now I have several handymen that don't make them compete for each other's position, but they know that if they can't get to it in a timely manner, it's going right to the next handyman. So if I was at a distance, I would have a property manager. I do have a tax person, but like you said, eventually you're going to go to Bob Langworthy from Maine Bean Counters. And you're going to have them probably fix your last couple of years just in case your guy wasn't the right guy or right girl. But I'm the anti-team guy. The last thing I wanted was a team. If I had a team, I would have missed out on half the deals I've got.

Mike, I imagine you have a team.

You have to have a team. Yes, absolutely. And Dion and I have argued about this before, and he got destroyed in that debate. So if— in fact, it was so bad that he had to, he had to host the live himself just so he could mute me out. No, just kidding, buddy, you look great. Uh, no, having a team is very, very important because I think one of the mistakes that a lot of people make is trying to think they can do it all themselves, you know. And, and if you want to actually become successful, you're going to have to realize that at some point you have to let certain tasks go. Um, very few people can do everything themselves. Even people like the Lumberjack Landlord who manages 137 of his own rental units, well, he doesn't do all the repairs. His team that does the repairs. He's contractors and handyman, and he's got real estate agents that show the properties. You know, him and his wife used to show the properties themselves, but they got way too many. They can't go do open houses and listings. They hire people for that. So I, I think really what you need to recognize is there's, there's definitely a time and place for you to do more of the work yourself. I self-manage my own duplex that I live in and list it, and the tenants over there I vet, and I have them do the credit card, uh, check, I run their credit card and their background and their eviction background, all that type of stuff. But as your portfolio gets bigger, especially at a distance where I don't know the local laws, I don't even know all of the local cultures and customs. Like, most people don't know this, but in Gary, Indiana, the landlord doesn't apply— doesn't provide appliances like a refrigerator or a dishwasher or the laundry. The tenants bring all that stuff with them. That's not how it is here in Seattle. In Seattle, you have to provide all that stuff. If it breaks, you got to fix it. Like, If you don't know the local customs, you're going to get taken advantage of. And I would have put a bunch of stuff in there that would have promptly been stolen, and I would have been like, what's going on? Um, you want a good team. You want the right people on your team. Why is it important to continually vet them? Because everybody is capable and susceptible to becoming complacent. And your contractors will say, I always get the bid from this guy. And so they'll just slowly start working those prices up. And your property manager will say, ah, you know, he always just lets me, uh, He never complains when I have to put— or when I put a bad tenant in there, we have victim or something like that. It's like, no, no, I'm paying attention to all these things. Everyone's going to get a bad tenant eventually, but you're still on a tight leash. If you get too many bad tenants, what's going on? You're wasting my time, our time. You're getting paid more to place new tenants than I'm getting paid in the rent from these tenants. And so constantly monitoring, continuously observing. What is it that Matt says all the time? People don't do what's expected, they do what's inspected. And so you need to constantly be inspecting other people's work.

There's a good one. This is just— I'm going to expand the question a little bit, but this is someone in Washington State, like we all— where we all live. For your first house hack, would you prefer a duplex, triplex, or fourplex for your first purchase? Does it even matter? I'll expand that to, uh, does unit count matter at all if you're doing a, if you're doing a house hack? If you want to live in the unit, uh, do you have a preference of unit count? I'll, I'll preface this with my buddy Caleb, who is one of the original mentees of my program. I think he's one of the more successful investors. Arguably, he's done better than all of us, um, because he, uh, he made less mistakes, uh, the way he built his portfolio because he asked all of us questions at some point. But he, uh, he house hacked a 25-unit where he was paid $5,000 a month to live in a really cool college town in Texas as a 20-year-old. Um, when you're buying a property, does the unit count matter for house hacking? Dion, you've done— you guys have actually done house hacks. I, I kind of did it with a condo, but, um, I'm curious your guys' opinion.

2 things that I consider. The first one is I want to make sure that the house hack is done with fixed rate debt. So if I'm going to use Convoy Home Loans up to 8 or 10 units, whatever their current metric is, and they'll give you fixed rate debt, I would have done an 8 or 10 unit or 4 unit or duplex. Here's what I look at, Ken, and I wish I knew how to play the drums. I would kind of do the drum roll in Ken's honor because that's what Ken does. I would take right from the Michael Zuber One Rental at a Time theory which one has the best yield, right? So, and I put a comment there, I would, I would look at, you know, over the last couple of years I kept saying I've got a bunch of money in the bank, it's a terrible problem to have, I'd like to buy a fourplex, I'd like to put 25% down on a fourplex, want it to be my next property. So I was hunting for fourplex, it's making offers and hunting, and then a duplex popped up that was a better deal. It had the best deal that I found that had the right yield I was looking for, so that's the one I went for. So, Kent, when you're starting I would have a search set up for if you're looking at fixed rate debt, what loan product are you using? And I understand you're using conventional loan because right now they have 5% down on up to 5 units. If you do go DSCR asset-based or one of those, um, ones that go up to 8 to 10 units, it might be a little bit higher down payment. Doesn't mean you can't do it, means you might just have to consider your situation when you're looking. Have your searches set up for duplex, triplex, fourplex in that area that you want to house hack, and whichever— or house with ADU. Don't forget that metric. That's That's, that's an often missed asset class that homebuyers don't want because they don't want tenants, and investors often miss it because they do what I just did and say small multifamily, duplex, triplex, fourplex in their search, and they miss ADU, DADU, JADU, accessory dwelling unit, auxiliary dwelling unit, granny flat, mother-in-law house, all the ways that the listing agent might put out two units on one property. And then as you're hunting, what's the best deal that slaps you in the face that you just know you shouldn't pass up? That's the one I go for.

How about you? Uh, how about you, Mike? What are your thoughts on house hacking? Does unit count matter for the house hack?

So yeah, that's kind of an interesting question, and I, I don't even know how I feel about it 100%. I certainly think that there is a vanity, a vanity aspect of people talking about their unit count. Sometimes you'll see these videos and these influencers online like, oh yeah, I got I got 250 units and I got 800 units and I got 1,000 units. And it's like, well, maybe you own 1 or 2% of a larger syndication that owns that and you just get, you know, you, you get to feel good about yourself when you go flex at your local real estate meetup and you say that. But is it really true? Probably not. So some of that is a vanity metric and you really shouldn't be too concerned about unit count. You should probably care more about cash flow. Like, money talks. What do you bring in in terms of dollars at the end of the month? That does a lot more than units. However, when it comes to doing your house hack, what I have noticed through all my years of looking at deals is that the house hack is the best because you're getting rent to assist you with your mortgage. But for whatever reason, triplexes typically are just a little bit better than duplexes, and fourplexes are just usually a little bit better than triplexes. Is there a situation where the yield, as Dion mentioned, on a duplex could be better than the yield on a fourplex? Sure, that maybe you're getting one at a better deal or better financing versus— sure, in which case go with a better yield. But I found that as a general trend, typically the increase in cost to go from duplex to triplex is a lower increase in cost versus the amount of rent that you get from going from duplex to triplex. And again, from triplex to fourplex, you just get more rent, and then you also mitigate the cost of what happens if your tenant moves out. Well, if you got 4 people well, you're in one of the units. So if you have 3 people in a fourplex and somebody moves out, you still have 2 people paying rent, ideally. And so I personally, I would try— Kent, and Kent's a good dude, I've met him many times now— I would be looking for a fourplex as like my dream purchase. But if I can only find a duplex that works with yield, I have no problem buying a duplex. Obviously, I live in one right now.

And I'll take the, the contrarian view of I, I live in a house And it is more than supported by the first 38-plex I bought. And it's not about buying, it's not about buying a bigger building because build bigger doesn't mean better. But factually, more units typically are going to have more income. Mike, I think you nailed it on the head. There's a lot of people online who own 2% of 10,000 units and they're like, I have a bajillion. I've said this multiple times on my channel. Matt, the Lumberjack Landlord, has more real estate than me. He has half the unit count. He doesn't have partners. He owns all his real estate. I own about, on average, because I have partners, 33% is my average. There's buildings I own myself. There's buildings without partners. There's buildings I own with one partner, 50/50. There's buildings that I own 25% of the way that we structured the deal. I have way more than 2% equity in my portfolio. But if you're like a Matt the Lumberjack landlord, you just own more real estate than me with half the unit count. Unit count is not what you chase. What I found worked for me was I don't like sharing walls with neighbors. I'm, uh, what I found is I'm kind of a princess with stuff. I don't like working with people and I don't like sharing walls with people. And I think the message here is I'm an introvert. Um, I bought enough rentals to support my house. And to me, that is the exact same thing as house hacking. I have renters who pay the rent that covers the mortgage on my house. I didn't need to share a wall to do that. To get the loan product I wanted because I negotiated my own loan product that worked for me. Dion got 30-year debt. So did you, Mike, I assume. 30-year fixed-rate debt because you chose to house hack, and they got a superior debt product for the sacrifice of sharing wall. So I think it mostly depends on who you are is the best I can answer that question. The unit count's not the thing. What you want to do is the thing and build that.

There's two times house hacking is really important. The higher the cost of living in the area that you live in and the lower your income. The more money you make, the less important house hacking is. And the lower the cost of living in the area that you move to, the less important house hacking is. So for a lot of us, it's a great way to start, but is it required? Absolutely not. Zuber's never house hacked, right? It's not, it's not a requirement. It's just a cheat code to wealth. And we use several cheat codes. We use the tax code legally, which is a cheat code to wealth. We use inflation, which is a cheat code to wealth. If somebody owns assets and has a net worth of zero, and somebody owns no assets and has a net worth of zero, and inflation happens, the person who owns the assets and had a net worth of zero now has a massive net worth because of the cheat code of inflation. And so it's not like you have to house hack. In Kent's position, I highly recommend it. In mine and Mike's, I highly recommend it.

Dion, do you actually do the bedroom rental strategy, by the way? You, you had mentioned, uh, that it's a Section 8 possibility. Is that something you've actually executed?

I know Section 8 does that. I have a couple of rentals where it's roommates who rent the entire place, but they are roommating together. And then I have rented a room in my unit when I lived in my fourplex to somebody. Okay. I like to travel, and I like somebody to be there to take care of my place. Kind of like having a duplex where I'm at now, the person in the other unit is going to get a rent discount because they're going to take care of the stuff when I'm gone.

I'll be gone for at least half the year, so. Okay, I'll also pop the question up. I was just curious if we had anyone qualified to actually answer it, but for a room, uh, rental, what sites would you like posting on? I will say this just for general rentals, I post on everything with my property management company— apartments.com, rent.com, anywhere that you can push stuff out to, nothing has ever beat— in any market I'm at, nothing has beat Facebook Marketplace. I'm not, not even remotely kind of close. If something is not renting immediately, I post on Facebook Marketplace and it gets rented in like a week. And that is true in South Texas, in Dallas, Texas, in Mason County, Washington, in Grant County, Washington. It has been the same thing for me everywhere. If I'm looking for humans, Facebook Marketplace has been absolutely unbeatable by a huge margin. That's just me though. I don't know if you guys have had any experience with that.

I put one on Facebook Marketplace and got banned for a month. Never found out why. They just came back a month later and said, we've reviewed the complaint and it seems like you were just listing a rental, so you are no longer banned. I'm like, all right. So I use Hemlane because I put all the information in once, I hit one button, they put it out on 30 platforms, everything but Craigslist. So through Hemlane, it hits all of the platforms. And I'm the same way. Within 3 or 4 days, I have 30 to 50 applicants to kind of filter through. And if they fill out an application, yeah, I'll go and I'll do a walkthrough. But for the most part, I'll do open house format, and I'll say I'll be there this night from 5 to 7, or this day on Saturday at this time. You're welcome to come. There will be other people looking. And at the last one, guy shows up, says I'll take it. He says I'm going to Zelle you the deposit. And I'm talking to him, another guy walks in, says I'll pay you $150 a month more. So that open house format has been a good strategy for me. I just signed with the first guy at the agreed-upon amount, but that tenant now knows that they've got a good deal and is less likely to go somewhere else.

No, you know, kidding. You should just pay me next time you're getting somebody under contract. Let me know and I'll run in and be like, I'll take your entire stock, double his offer, and then you look like the saint of a landlord for sticking with a little guy.

It's a great strategy.

Yeah.

Like, what do you use? Are you also using Hemway, or what do you use to fill the rentals?

So for my own duplex, this is the only property that I self-manage, is this duplex, and I was just using Zillow and Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. Um, out of state, I have property managers that take care of all of that because they know the local economy and the local standards better. This is another thing you need to learn when you're a long-distance investor. The standards that I have in Seattle of 3 times the income and a minimum credit score of 690 If you're making 3 times the income and have a credit score of 690 in Gary, Indiana, you leave Gary, Indiana and you go buy a house. Houses are $100,000 in the surrounding cities and they're $60,000 in Indiana. Nobody who has that type of financial background is a renter there. My property manager had to sit me down and say, I'm not going off of credit score. I run their credit and then I look at their credit and I make sure that if the reason their credit sucks is because of medical bills and student loans, we don't care as much versus if they're not actually paying their house note and some of their other bills. She gets in like surgical with what she looks at on the credit reports. And in terms of their income, well, we're doing Section 8, so income isn't really a huge deal because the property is already getting paid for. So she has a different list of stipulations that she goes by, and she uses— I've got two property managers, one of them manages almost all my units. She uses Buildium. I'm not a huge fan of that property management software. The other one uses AppFolio. I think AppFolio is better, um, but you know, when you're using a property manager, you are somewhat subject to what they use.

Yeah, and I've found that very consistently because I've used Buildium. Buildium is the easiest user face or user interface. AppFolio is just the best. Yeah, it's so robust. Every time I've tried to use something else, I've gone back to AppFolio. Um, but you have to have at least 50 units that you manage to use Appfolio. They will not work with you with less than that. At least they wouldn't back when I did it. Um, let's see here. Oh, I don't know about the back half to this question, but we'll, uh, let's read it. There's a guy who asked Cody what you're doing, um, or what you're going to do when your tenants can't pay your rent, bro. Oh, this was the Bradley podcast. Uh, this was a fun one, by the way. They only had 2 cameras, so they put it on Cody and Bradley. I was in fact in the room, and I did contribute to that podcast. I swear I was there. So everyone's like, oh, that podcast with Cody? I'm like, you mean with Cody and I? Um, yeah, bro, funny stuff. I'm like, dude, you're Bradley, get a third camera. Okay, I'm here. Um, I should have just— I should have just walked over to Brad's desk and just popped in to get FaceTime, but I didn't do that, and I regret it. Um, but, uh, yeah, that was a fun one. I think I have a short of that. It— the exact quote, he's like, so, uh, what happens when, uh, you know, there's the next pandemic? It's all guns, ammo, and anarchy. Uh, no one's gonna pay your fucking rent, bro. Uh, Cody had a great response. He's like, well, you know what, if that happens, we'll just shift. We play the game where the goalposts are. And I actually think it's my favorite Cody Davis quote of all time. That's all you can do. The rules will change. Things happen in the economy. There are world events that you can't control. We just play the game wherever the posts are, and if they shift, we'll play the game somewhere else. And that is just like— there's things that you can't plan for, and for those things, my plan is, okay, well, we don't plan for those because they haven't happened yet and there's no way to plan. I couldn't have planned for a pandemic. What I can do is fix every variable I can. Which means take the least amount of partners as humanly possible because people are variables. That means fix my debt for the longest term possible because variable rate debt is variable and I don't want variables. If you have less variables, you have less to deal with. And if the worst happens, you're going to adjust because if we have a pandemic or World War III or other economic crisis, everyone is equally screwed. You're just going to play the game where it's at. That's my advice. I literally— my favorite Cody Davis quote of all time. And I loved that it was a high-pressure interview and Brad was grilling him, and his response was just ice cold. Just doesn't matter. I was like, oh, well, let's take it a step further.

We've been through that. What do we see? $56 billion in rent relief put out in the CARES Act, the option to go into forbearance. So yeah, your tenants don't have to pay their rent. I never had one late or missing rent payment in a decade. Even through the pandemic. And then you can go into forbearance, and when you come out of forbearance, they have to offer you a 40-year fixed-rate loan product. Can we have another, please? Can it be worse? Does that work? And look what happened to rents— they're up 40% in the last 3 years. Look what happened to home prices— they're up. Every time that there's a tragedy, the person to be the most concerned for— and I'm sorry, this is most of the people who are going to find this content, it's going to make me sound like a complete douchebag But it's the moron that's got one income. They're W-2, the way I lived my first 40 years of my life. I was that person that was going, hey, it's a recession. I got laid off from law enforcement. What am I going to do? Nobody's hiring. Every law enforcement agency in the state was like, there's no revenue, so we're cutting positions. So if you don't have something else to fall back on versus— yes, we talked about this earlier in the video— Mike's got Section 8, they're gonna pay. I have Section 8, I have military, I have people that are working or retired. I might have a part of my portfolio impacted. I've planned my budgeting around rents dropping 50%, so we are actually planning our investing around the next big event. The person working that doesn't have assets is counting on nothing bad ever happening. We're planning on it. We're strategizing specifically. These are the bad things that can happen, and this is the way I— why I've invested the way I did, to be ready for them. And they're probably not going to happen..

And I can show the appraisal. I bought a 38-plex during the pandemic for $2 million before the restrictions were lifted. I have an appraisal for $4.1 million. I owned that 50/50 with Cody Davis. That doesn't suck. I made 7 figures off of stupid government policy when the whole world fell apart. And that's on one deal. I did 10 deals in that time, like solely because the government was stupid. They let me get through my project way faster. That one deal made each of us $1 million of net worth. That's not liquid money unless we sold. That is just appraised value. But we added $1 million to our balance sheet because the government helped us get our income up, and those assets are valued on the income approach. We took rents from $5,000 a month for 38 units— those total collections— to $29,500 a month. Those opportunities exist in adversity. That's what my dad told me growing up. That was his only investing strategy. He was like, hey, look, in adversity there's opportunity. And I'm like, I don't know what that means, but that sounds like something that will play a role in my life later. Um, when people stop playing and everyone else pauses and says, hey, uh, stuff's hard right now, all that means to me is a deal is still a deal and cash flow is still cash flow. But there are less players playing, there are more moves available. And I, I look forward to the next crisis economically, you know, not, not for everyone personally, but like usually when bad stuff happens, the people who own this stuff make money. That is just typically what happens. And by typically, I can think of exactly zero exceptions to that ever.

Last year when we went to the event, the one that we were doing this livestream for, that, uh, Pacific Northwest Action Summit last year, uh, Christian and Cody and I had a conversation and we talked about how the government is the reverse of a casino. Because in a casino, the house always wins, right? Well, the government is the house, but they always lose. And why do they always lose? Because they make the same choice for every problem. They pretend and extend. They inflate the money away, and they bail out and they blame other people. And so you get to walk into a casino where the house always loses. All you have to do is play any game you want, buy a piece of real estate. And when any problem happens, whether it's economic, whether we enter a world war, whatever it is, the government's going to do the same thing, pretend and extend, they're going to inflate the currency, and they're going to bail out and blame. And your real assets will go up in value.

And that is why— that's the literal reason why our entire strategy at Multifamily Strategy is, uh, how do you buy it, how do you never lose it? That is your underwriting criteria. If you can answer those two questions, you will automatically get rich over time. If you can acquire a property anywhere even near its value, you can overpay if you get great terms and long-term debt, as long as it cash flows. If you get paid to wait And you can wait a long period of time. You will always make money. There has never been in human history any exception to that outside of isolated markets like Detroit where the values just went way down and the auto industry died. Minus extremely isolated things, that holds true everywhere for all time. Uh, Michael, what, uh, components make a deal good? Oh, this is, it is actually an interesting question. Um, I have thoughts. Dion, what makes a deal good for you?

So this is very important that you have a mental, uh, commercial when you meet somebody and they say, what are you looking for? You should be able to spit out a good deal in my area is I've learned the area average yield and a deal will beat that. So in your area, if average deal gets you 4 or 5%, you're looking for a 7 or 8. Mine, it's 7 or 8, so I'm looking for 10s. So what yield beats area average? Then it is— is it at least 10 miles from my other properties? Is it close to several economic drivers so I have sources of tenants? Are there physical aspects of the property that help me limit tenant turnover, like enough parking, washer dryer hookups inside each unit, 2 bedrooms and a garage? Because more space means more stuff, less likely to move. Is it pet friendly? Like, I go through this laundry list. Math is a step in the process, but there's a lot of other things that can disqualify a property that even if it might have a great yield in Tacoma, Washington. I know a couple properties right now that have a 15 to 20% cash-on-cash return on McKinley Avenue. Even Michelle Meyer, in the middle of a 1031, backed out of a deal there that would have had a great yield. But you have so much tenant turnover and you feel like a horrible person sending a property manager to collect your rent because there's a 50/50 chance they get robbed on their way to do it. So math isn't very important. But know your criteria so that when you're looking at properties— what we do during my members-only live streams, which I'm doing tomorrow after the live stream, Tuesday, Tuesday, there's a members-only live stream at 6 o'clock where we're going to open up emails with listing agents, um, auto searches. We're going to go into a deal and we're going to go through all the mental process of what would it look like to be a good deal, break down how the math works, and then we look at the physical, physical aspects of the property and the area to determine if it's a property we keep looking at. And it takes 45 minutes to look at a deal and go through the mental process, but it takes 30 seconds to actually look at the deal and make all the decisions we do in that 45-minute course.

So I think that people— I think that people need to realize being a real estate investor is a, um, How do I phrase this properly? Look at yourself as if you're an athlete. Okay. And when you first started playing sports, whatever it was, you sucked. And over time you get better. You're developing skills over time. So if we look at a basketball player, if we look at elementary kids playing basketball, what will we consider a good game for them versus what will we consider a high schooler, a college player, and then an NBA player? What you may think of as a good deal today is going to change over time based on the skill set that you have. For a lot of people just starting out, your skill as an investor is very low. And I think there's this misconception, especially when you hear people who've been doing it for a very long time, there's this misconception that I should be able to do a deal, my first deal, that's on par or equivalent with what this skilled, experienced, 10 years and 200 deals under the belt investor is doing. I think that's the wrong way to look at it. Is it possible for Caleb Hommel to come out there and get a seller finance? Yeah, it's possible. And that was a great deal. But I think for a lot of people out there, what you need to recognize is that your version of a good deal or a great deal is going to be different than mine, because as I have gotten better as an investor, I've added more and more requirements to my deals. Initially, I was just looking for single-family houses that were turnkey properties that were going to make me make $250 a month in cash flow from day one and average around a 15% cash on cash return. Where I'm at right now is I'm looking to 2 to 4 unit buildings that are 18 to 22% cash on cash return. They're gonna make me like $700 to $800 of cash flow a month, and I'm trying to incorporate the BRRRR strategy so that every single dollar I put into that property I can double or triple. All of this skill was built over several years of investing, so what a good deal is for me today is completely different than what it was in the past because I've gotten better. But that doesn't mean that you still couldn't go out there and find a turnkey duplex that makes you a couple hundred bucks a month, that has a lower percentage return than what I have but still better than treasury bonds, and that couldn't be your first deal. And then every deal after number 1 needs to get slightly better along the way.

And for me, a good deal is a deal that you can keep. Which means you get paid to own it and you can hold it forever. The best metric I found for that, if you're a metrics person— I think there's a lot of garbage acronyms out there for— a lot of them are for syndicators to sell their deals. The thing that I have found that matters is debt service coverage ratio, because that is the money after your net operating income that you have left to service your debt. And that is what a bank's primarily going to look at to finance your deal. So if you can get a debt service coverage ratio of 1.5 or greater, which means that you save 50% of your mortgage every month after all expenses, including paying the mortgage, you likely have a good cash-flowing deal. If that is a long-term debt product and you have a DSCR of 1.5 or greater, you— I would consider you to be in a fantastic place. Now, for those who don't know, Mike Zuber will be our keynote speaker for the event. Um, Mark Zuber may be his brother here. I'm not sure, but, uh, there's a question for Dion. Dion, did you learn most of your knowledge from Mr.

Mike Zuber? In 2018, I had reached financial freedom. Work was optional and I could have retired. And then I found the One Rental at a Time community. It would have made the investing to get to that point a lot less stressful and a lot more focused in the first couple of years. So I've learned from Zuber, and I still learn from Zuber every time I interact with him, but I had reached financial freedom and then found him. And he has improved my processes a lot since then too. So I still watch his content. I'm excited for him coming up there. I got to meet him again. Mike and I met him in Fresno at his event, then we met him in Vegas. And so we get to see him again at the Northwest Action Summit on May 3rd and 4th. Looking forward to that. And he's bringing his wife Olivia.

She's awesome.

Awesome.

I haven't actually had a chance to meet her yet, so I'm excited to meet her there too. Another reason to come to the event, everyone. May 3rd and 4th in Vancouver, Washington. Hotel is ridiculous. The food last year was really good, so I assume it only gets better. I'm not involved on the catering team, uh, but that is going to be a fantastic, fantastic event. Make it out. I think— I don't remember how many seats there are left, but they're getting limited. I know the ticket sales are filling up very fast. So, uh, if you are looking for the event to go to this summer Uh, that is right on the Portland, Oregon border. Beautiful hotel and tons of networking. All of us will be there. Mike Zuber will be there. You should be there too. Clint asks if we're a doomsayer's channel. Please say we're not. None of us are. No, all of us, uh, that is a cheap way to get a lot of views online. And I think Robert Kiyosaki has massively, massively overplayed the doomsday conversation. Uh, perpetually being a bear is not sexy. Up or down, there are ways to win. I find it's easier to win in the down market, but as long as the government can continue to cheat and print money, the music keeps going, and they have some more runway to do so. So I don't think the whole world is going to fall apart here anytime soon. Oh, this is a good one for, uh, for Dion, who's quit his W-2. I, well, I guess I also don't My W-2s are all from companies I own, so I think that's kind of cheating. Um, how do you get loans approved once you quit your W-2 and have lots of cash flow from your portfolio? Like when you have multiple mortgages, what does it look like to get conventional financing when you don't have a job?

So I typed out a response because I, I'm less likely to sound condescending when I type it out because of how simple this is. Yeah, that's why, right? Because you— we want to answer something and always remember it's hard to remember what it's like to not know something. So once I knew this, it seemed like, why doesn't everybody know this? For 2 years, real estate is difficult. For 2 years, they're looking at your salary, your debt-to-income ratio, you. Once you have rental income on 2 years of tax returns— I've had lenders tell me not look at my W-2 on the last 4 mortgages. Like, they were like, yeah, we'll look at that, that doesn't matter, show me your rent rolls. They'll go— they said, they said to me the specific words, you can buy any property you want, there's no limit to how much you can borrow. You just have to have the down payment because what they're going to do after those 2 years of rental income on your tax returns is they're going to look at 75% of the rents in your debt-to-income ratio, including the property that you're buying. So as long as you're not buying a bad deal— like Clint's had some really bad deals and was breaking even— yeah, they're not going to lend you on that. You got to make some money. So you have to find deals where 75% of the rents will cover the mortgage. You can buy anything you want. Your W-2 means nothing after those 2 years. Yes, they'll still make you jump through hoops and they'll verify things, but not having a W-2 has not stopped me at all, and it's not going to stop me. I still have lenders approving almost anything I want to do. Some lenders will put a little extra caveat on there, and they're going to want the majority of your tenants, which means 51%, to have leases with at least 3 months remaining. The first time I had a lender tell me this, I was a little confused. I actually said, you're gonna let me make a 30-year commitment for hundreds of thousands of dollars because a tenant made a 3-month commitment for a couple thousand dollars in rent? And the lender said yes. We're not going to own your mortgage in 3 months. We're just worried about when you get it. It's like, okay, that makes sense. So yeah, that's how— once you quit your W-2, do not quit your W-2 to get into real estate. Get a couple of rentals, get a couple of years with rental income on your tax returns, and then you might lose the W-2 to continue investing in real estate. But in the beginning, that W-2 for those first 2 years is the platform that you launch yourself off of.

And on, on my end, uh, one way to get around it is commercial loans don't care about your personal income at all. They want to see what you're doing on a, on a large scale. So if you buy bigger buildings, you negate that pretty much in its entirety. Um, however, I live in a tiny little house in Renton, Washington. Dion's been over. I have a small little house. Um, it's nothing exciting. I bought $27 million of real estate before I qualified for a conventional loan. I am now building a house that is not small in Texas. And by not small, I mean it's really not small. It is, it is excessive. Um, I was not able to do that until I was far enough in business where multiple businesses had 2 years of tax returns and my portfolio had seasoned for 3 years. Uh, that's just, it's part of how you play the game. But to Dion's point, uh, once that kicks in and you've built a portfolio, none of it matters anymore. You make enough money, you have enough experience, your properties you could show in your tax returns, hey, these make money, and you're off to the races. They're more interested in your Schedule E, which is all of your investment income, than they are your W-2. Heard banks cap at 10 active loans. How do you get around this? This is also specific to residential, which I almost never buy, so this is a better one for you two. How do you get around the 10 active residential loans that banks cap you at?

Would you like to, Mike? Commit mortgage fraud.

I'm just kidding, that's a joke.

Getting—

kidding. I did not clap at that. No one record that.

That is not going online. No, that, that's a very good question. Uh, there's many different things that you can do. First of all, the traditional financers, the, the qualifying mortgage financers like your big box banks or most mortgage lenders that you're going to be looking at. They'll only do 10 in your name. However, there's non-QM lenders. We've talked about non-QM lenders a couple of times, like Velocity Mortgage or Convoy Home Loans, like I mentioned earlier, those do fixed rate debt on up to 8 units. Well, the reason they can go up to 8 units is because they're a non-QM lender. They're not following the same guidelines that the Fannie Freddie loans are following. And what a QM, the qualifying mortgage, is, it's a loan that can be backed by Fannie and Freddie, which are the government programs that buy these loans up to secure the asset and shore up the economy. So you can, you can have an unlimited amount of those. And then what I chose to do long before I hit my 10-loan cap, and this is what I would encourage you to do, is you need to start learning about seller financing and creative financing, because they're significantly better ways to finance a real estate deal than 20% down with whatever the interest rates of the day happen to be. And if the prices versus interest rates suck to give you a terrible payment. You got to hope that the seller is reasonable. Sneak peek, they're not. It's much better. Yeah, they're not. They're delusional, bro. It's much better if you just start working and learning creative finance and seller financing as quickly as possible. And like I mentioned earlier, with my goal, my end goal being to get it to 30-year fixed rate debt, if I can buy it creatively And once I own it and put some private money on it creatively, and then I can force some equity into it, and now I create the deal that makes sense for the 30-year product. Because if I just go to the MLS and hope someone's going to give me something that makes sense, sorry, it's not 2013, '14, '15, '16 when everything made sense coming out of the Great Recession. Now you got a bunch of delusional homeowners that want top dollar for a non-repaired property that's not turnkey with interest rates that suck. That's not a winning strategy.

Get creative. I love that. Yeah. And then I know like a good channel to follow if you want to know the— I, I imagine we all agree Matt Hawkins, Lumberjack Landlord, is probably the most experienced with banks of all of us. His— he's written his own loan products. He has conventional loans on way more than 10 properties. Um, there are so many different ways to play the game. If that is like the main thing you want to learn He is the one in our friend group who is the one to check out. Lumberjack Landlord, uh, he's recently retired as well. He's joined the retired club, uh, so he has time to answer all the questions. So he, he goes live. He went live this morning, didn't he? Um, he goes live every Sunday. That is a great— he's the best one to ask specific bank questions for. He's helped me navigate some stuff I didn't know was possible. Um, actually, that's usually my go-to if I don't know something. It's ask Matt. He is, uh, waiting.

My question for Shiva, with, you know, the, the four-armed warrior here, is I heard banks cap at 10 active loans. Those are conventional loans. There's no limit to how many times you can house hack, right? You have to stay in the house for a year, so it's limited by time on how many you can do. Uh, my question always when somebody asks a question like that is, how many mortgages do you currently have? When I had 3 mortgages, I was thinking, wow, 10 is a limit. I got to 6 mortgages and I'll probably never have another one. I make over a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in profit with 8 properties. Right. So what is your goal? To have 50 mortgages on 50 properties? Yeah, you're going to get into the DSCR, asset-based commercial, seller financing. But if you're just starting right now, have you talked to a lender and found out what your options are? It might be conventional is the best bet. You might learn the skills and do creative financing, but have you tapped out of all of the resources that exist for everyone else?

It. Ninja suggests it's time for a mentorship giveaway. I subscribe to the old— I used to work for CoStar Group. Andy Florence, no discounts ever. They, they devalue your product. If value's there, there's no discounts.

Um, Ninja Vanish is, is famous on my channel for actually giving away memberships.

I—

he's probably at 10 to 20 that he's given away. That's incredible. It is. And because then they come to the membership meetings where we do that, because it's I want to do this on YouTube, but it would absolutely kill my channel. Yeah, we open up an email from an agent and we look at the deals, and then we go through 45 minutes of what does the deal look like. Imagine if you found that on YouTube, a group of people all jumped on Zoom together, but they're just looking at emails. It'd be super boring for YouTube. But the members know twice a month we're going to go in here, we're going to literally get to hear all of these investors think of what would they look at at a property to learn the skill to use that in your market. So I appreciate each one of those that you've given away, Ninja Advantage.

You're awesome. One idea that I had that is on— it's on the kind of— it's the free, uh, the free stuff idea is how fun would it be to take— because we do a deal deep dive thing in my mentorship every week. We go over deals. Uh, Mike actually helped us this week on, uh, people going over deals. Mike, we got fantastic feedback from that, by the way. Oh good. I got like too many texts from people being like, bring that guy back. So nice. Yeah, I'm gonna do that.

He hasn't even done that for mine.

Yet.

Like, he's come on with me, but he's never just, hey, I'll cover it for you for an hour.

Dude, it is, uh, yeah, the feedback is everyone loves Mike. Um, I don't know what it is. Mike's like just the fan favorite. Uh, and I've had you, you, Matt, Dion, they've all— everyone's done it. Uh, everyone's had good reviews. Mike is by far the most messages following up from the, uh, the mentorship. But when we do this, one thing I think that would be fun sometime is to take the deal deep dive from the month and just do a live presentation with actual rules of like, you have 15 minutes to pitch your deal and just have people come on and present their deal to actual investors just so people get to see like, okay, what does it look like when you present the deal? What does it look like to pitch for capital? And oh, by the way, a couple hundred people can be watching on YouTube who may or may not be interested in reaching out and funding your deal. Who knows? But just talking about live deals and actually showing the process. I think it'd be super fun, just game show style. Let's take 4 deals, 1 hour 15 minutes per deal, get a little panel going, and judges can grade the best presentation. I think that would be the most fun thing ever that would actually be valuable. I like it.

What's that?

Real estate Shark Tank. Yeah, there we go. Real estate Shark Tank. Um, you have to do it with someone with money because I have, I have equity, uh, cash, negative, no.

I had money, then I have a bird.

So yep, that's how, that's what my universe goes. I'm like, I have money, and then I'd buy something and I'm like, oh well, that was nice. Real estate investors almost exclusively are very, very wealthy broke people. If you played the game for some time, you— I know very few people who have a significant amount of cash at any time. I have a friend with a $130 million real estate portfolio, and he was liquid $16 million. And then I met with him 5 weeks later and he's like, I may need a loan. I spent it all and I may have got out a little over my skis. And then he, and then he got liquid again, but he literally, you know, $130 million portfolio, no money. Crazy. Crazy. Cash flow is like $200,000 a month.

Well, that's good. That's the thing, as an investor, we're always broke. The money that comes in gets put to work. It's not like the money that comes in is ours. I mean, it is once you retire. Yes, once everything is stabilized and in place. But during that growth phase, the person with a job that has zero investments feels richer than us.

That is so true. There are so many times where I'm like, you know what would be fantastic right now?

Money. Um, and why don't we all get into this in the first place?

Damn it.

It's, it's not get rich quick. It's get a lot richer than most people, notably faster, is what I have found that, that real estate is. It is the surest way I've ever seen to become wealthy if you are disciplined and willing to wait. By the way, if you haven't Dylan's already done the thing, subbed all the channels. We all have totally different methods, we talk about different things. Mike's gone live a total of like 9 times, uh, but he has great YouTube videos. Uh, so Mike has great comment. Dion's like the king of us going live, uh, the undisputed champion. Right now we have 80 people watching, 66 are from Dion's channel. I mean, if that tells you, tells you anything, Dion brings the people. Um, but all of these channels, we talk a lot about real estate, and these are all people who I would endorse. Mike is fantastic. Dion's fantastic. A lot of my start— I took so many things from Dion getting started. Incredible investor, and he invests completely different than me, which is awesome. I'm seeing if there's any other good questions here. We're actually— I'm actually catching up. I'm actually somewhere near the bottom. Um, Any book you'd recommend to learn creative financing options? You know what's crazy? No. Um, Cody has this book, uh, one of my business partners, uh, he has a book, uh, called Deals on Wheels by Lonnie Scruggs that he always recommends, and it's out of print and it costs like $300 now. I think it might be more. I don't, I don't think I want to spend $300 on a book. That's just, that's just me. I think YouTube University has more on creative finance than any book I've ever seen. And I think creative finance is so subjective. They're like, there's just so much to it. Well, that was my camera decided to zoom right as I said that, like, epic moment. There's so much to creative finance. I would just find the people who are doing the creative deals you wanna do, ask them questions, get to know them. If they have a mentorship, join the mentorship, follow their YouTube channels. And I'm not just saying follow mine. There's multiple strategies. There's a lot of different people playing the game. Find the pace and the strategy of your investing that matches what you want to do and just do that. What I would avoid doing is getting 15 books on it and joining 3 mentorships and following 25 YouTube channels, because you're going to end up learning a whole bunch and doing nothing.

So when it comes to creative finance, almost every deal is unique, Christian, even the ones you've done, right? Yep. In order to get the best that you can be at creative finance, you need to learn communication skills more so than any book on creative finance. I would study NLP, salesmanship, anything that, that can make you a better communicator, because it comes down to the art of negotiation. I mean, Never Split the Difference, those kind of books. Uh, the more content you take in, once you have that, that ability to communicate to somebody to make your mind resonate with theirs so the communication goes better. Then add the skills of how does creative finance work, because now that I know how to get people to at least see my point of view and feel heard, now I can show them the thing we want to do.

This is, this is why I disagree on Dion on the team building things. Dion, you, you already have all the skills of how to make the people do the things that they need to do.

I don't want it. It's almost a superpower. I've got two. It's almost a superpower if your goal is growth. Yeah, absolutely right. The lumberjack landlord, he's above the 10 loans in his name. You absolutely need that team. I, I think you do need that team. But if your goal is the right amount of cash flow from the least amount of units, financial freedom in a decade, or make work optional because you're super lazy, I don't want a team.

I think to Dion's point, the best books you can read, uh, Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss, you mentioned that one. Uh, phenomenal, phenomenal. Uh, Jordan Belfort, Straight Line Selling. He's Wolf of Wall Street guy. Phenomenal book. It must be consumed in audiobook cuz he talks a bunch about tonality and reading about tonality I found was absolutely worthless. Listening to him use the tonality while reading the book. That changed the way that my pitches land. But if you can learn those and get a yes, like if you know how to get a yes and actually listen and negotiate, you can negotiate anything. That's probably the most valuable skill. The next most valuable thing you need to be able to do, you need to spend the time to learn how to underwrite a deal. In creative finance, you get what you negotiate. You can negotiate something stupid and screw yourself over. Like someone says yes to something you negotiate and you don't know what you're doing. Congratulations, you have an obligation or a debt that you did not structure correctly. So I would learn everything that I could on how to underwrite and how to have salesmanship. And if you have those two skills, that's— I mean, realistically, that's 99% of what you need. You're basically there if you can do those two things. Mike, anything you recommend for creative finance? You've done a good deal of creative.

I agree with you that when it comes to creative financing, there's really no books out there that I can think of. I prefer YouTube channels. I prefer listening to people talking about a real deal and listening to them explain how they creatively finance their deal will then inspire you to ways to how you can make it work in your market with your projects, with your properties. And so this real estate investing gambit really is like a cafeteria or a buffet, and you guys are walking up picking out what you like out of each one of our presentations. And there's people you may resonate with more, or a certain phrase that someone uses to articulate what their thoughts are. But at the end of the day, Christian's right and Dion's both right when they say that just the power of learning to communicate is incredibly valuable. So many people, when they start to talk, fill their sentences with, um, uh, and, you know, like, uh. We were all like that at one It's nothing to be ashamed of. We all grew up filling sentences or filling speeches with those filler words that make us sound less professional. And to be able to articulate for a minute or two on end and keep multiple different points going at the exact same time, all running in the back of your head, is a practiced skill. And you can practice it and get better at it. And I would encourage you— I was actually talking about this with my brother Joseph last night, who's 23 or 22. Because he was asking me about how I can speak like this after watching me talk for like 20 minutes on end and never slip up. And I said, dude, everywhere I drive, if I'm not listening to a podcast, I'm not listening to something, dude, this might be weird. I'm talking out loud to myself, practicing the presentation for my next YouTube video, my next sales pitch, the next chick that I'm hitting on. I'm working through the kinks of the process so that I can deliver that presentation flawlessly. Endlessly. And it may seem odd that I'll be listening to a book or watching a podcast, pause it so that I can pretend that I'm the one in that podcast giving the answer to the questioner. All of that practice makes you a more effective communicator. And Dion's just chomping at the bit to jump in here, so I'm gonna let him.

No, I just feel better knowing I'm not the only one that does that. Like, I've got a video coming out Thursday, I've said it to myself 3 or 4 times driving down the road already. Yeah.

You know where I pitch? The shower. If you can pitch it naked, you can pitch it dressed. It works every time.

What I do when I'm doing a presentation, I always picture I'm in a room full of people and I'm naked.

There we go. I've done my literal rehearsal naked, so I'm ready to go. I'm in there, I'm like, wow, this is easier than last time I did it. I wasn't dressed last time. Um, no, the, the, the car pitch, the one thing— I don't know if this is true for you guys— for me, if I over-practice it I will screw it up every time. I'll overtalk. If you have my disease of being a chronic overtalker in a meeting, definitely rehearse, but avoid overrehearsing because you will have the temptation to word vomit everything that you practiced without giving them room to speak. If you struggle with that, rehearse a couple times, get your main talking points. And then let the meeting carry itself because you need to spend more time focusing on listening than you do talking anyway. That's my last piece of advice on that.

I used to drive people crazy. So I was the president of the Northwest Career Colleges Federation, 112 vocational schools. I go to Olympia and I testify to the higher ed committee, the transportation committee, whatever committee was doing some legislation that we wanted to go one way or the other. I'd show up about 15 minutes early and I'd say, okay, What's the topic and which side of it are we on? Okay, and then I have 15 minutes to sit and prep, right? Because if I had time to script something and plan it out, I can't talk to save my life. But if I have bullet points and I could say it a few times out loud, I'm fine.

More evidence to the impact Dion has in my life: while I was having this conversation with my brother last night, I stole a Dion quote that he gave me. A few months back, and he said, if you need me to talk for an hour, I only need 10 minutes of prep time. But if you need me to talk for 10 minutes, I need a week worth of prep time. Because to get that condensed and to get that specific with what you're going to say takes significantly more preparation so that you don't go over your time and word vomit.

Nice. $300K liquid cash, best way to invest it? I usually do my investing without money. So if I have $300K in cash, I'm going to find opportunities and then I'll apply it towards the opportunity. I mean, if I have a, uh, a deal where I need a million down, I'm like, well, good, I got, I got about a third of it. That's, that's good news. Um, if I have a deal that I can buy without partners, that's $300K down, say seller finance deal, 10%, $3 million deal, $300K liquid. Granted, you should probably have reserves, but for the sake of illustration, I could buy $3 million of real estate with that seller financed. That's not bad. I can own that without a single partner. So a lot of different ways you can use it. I'm going to go back to my normal answer that I answer almost everything: deal, then debt, then equity. I'm going to find an opportunity and then I'll see where the $300K plays a role in it, as opposed to trying to match things to a limitation of $300K. That's, that's me.

What do you guys think? Mike would buy 1,200 homes, and Gary, the whole city, in cash.

Yeah, one purchase. Dion, you're a hater. If I had $300K, what I would do is completely different than what you would do, Home Advantage, because we have a different skill set, we have a different background, we have a different market, we have different risk tolerance. So I see these questions all the time, and I like where your head's at. You're just trying to get the perspective from other people. I understand it, but realistically You are different from me. Your skill set is different from me. What I would do, you probably shouldn't do. I would not encourage you to be like, oh yeah, just go buy 8 houses in Gary. You know nothing about the market. Don't do it. But you have a bunch of capital. There is a pathway forward for you to invest it and get a good return. And so what I would encourage you to do is to start getting very, very serious about researching the different types of investment strategies, some of the different markets you're interested in, and then pick one to become an expert on and study really hard for a few months, and then dip your toes in, buy that first property, get that first purchase, see how it goes, and then slowly learn from there. You don't have to deploy all $300,000 at one time.

Every time I answer these, I think people get irritated because of the element that I add that nobody wants to hear about. And right, you're saying, so if I had $300,000, I had no other assets, how would I invest it? That's how I'm going to interpret the question because I don't know your situation and I don't know your goals. For me, it would go like this: $50,000 in reserves, $50,000 towards a house hack. If my debt-to-income would allow me, I would acquire one more rental. The rest would sit in an account. I would save it until I had the rental income for 2 years to then be able to buy the next, um, thing in my area. The problem is the $300,000— I've only invested $320,000 over a period of 10 years. That $320,000 has turned into in 2022, $204,000 in profit, right? I'm doing my taxes for 2023, it's more than that. So $320,000 invested to make over $200,000 a year to live on, to figure out how to spend. But the element you don't want to hear about when you're starting is the decade, right? That first rental, I didn't, I didn't buy them and then all of a sudden have the cash flow. I had, I bought the first one It's now had 10 years of appreciation, 10 years of principal pay down, 10 years of rental increases. The next property's had 8, the next one has had 6.5, right? So the element of owning rentals over time is what set me free, not just owning the rentals. We all three had different answers, and none of them— I totally agree with Mike— is the one you should use. What little bits of our strategies can you take and put in an amalgamation that works for for you with your goals, your assets, and your skill set.

Now, for, for the— at least the questions that I came in and highlighted, I think we got through the, uh, the questions that I had, uh, I had set there. So I think we're right here at the end of the stream. Um, so this is a preview of some of the things that we'll be talking about at Northwest Action Summit. All of us are there live, as well as Mike Zuber, Cody Davis. There's a bunch of other speakers. Jesse Lee, who's a friend of mine who lives down the street, he definitely invests differently than I do. Uh, that guy's a character. He's gonna be sharing some, uh— Jesse's funny. Um, we're gonna have some fantastic speakers there. If you guys can make it out, it's May 3rd and 4th. I will post a link. I realized I forgot to do this in the video description, so, um, I will add a link on Multifamily Strategies page to the Northwest Action Summit. It's nwactionsummit.com. Snag a ticket if you haven't yet. Follow each of our channels. Dion Talk Financial Freedom, Millennial Mike, Multifamily Strategy here on YouTube. Thank you guys so much for joining me for almost 2 hours of live content.

Dion, what are you holding there? My crayons ready to eat. I'm a Marine ready for food when this is over. I'm set. Everybody's heard of those Meals Ready to Eat, right?

There's a Marine Corps version. There we go. All right everyone, till the next episode, we'll see you all soon.